So far as I was concerned, Mr. Crofton’s death certainly threw into question—even more question, that is—the idea that the murders were in some way meant as a threatening message to the king. Colin, however, was not altogether convinced. He could not deny the connections between Lizzie Hopman and her friends, but he insisted this did not mean the murderer was not also using his crimes to make a larger point—or a threat. We were arguing about it in my dressing room, where I was preparing for bed. I had dismissed Meg as I did not require her assistance when my husband was ready to lend a helpful, if diverting, hand.
“The predominant impact of each of the murders—aside from the tragic loss of life and the impact on families, etcetera—is the message sent by the elaborate staging,” Colin said. He’d traded his perfectly tailored suit for a pair of claret silk pajama trousers. Their matching top was nowhere in sight, but he had pulled on a paisley silk dressing gown, not bothering to tie it closed. The effect, if I may say, was more than a little distracting as he leaned elegantly against the wall and watched me brush my hair. “What message do you take from the crime scenes, my dear?”
“I know what you are trying to get me to admit,” I said.
“The staging of the bodies all but shouts that no one, not even a king, is safe from violent death. Who, then, would not assume the perpetrator means to threaten the king?”
“I cannot deny the logic in your thinking, particularly given the timing of the first murder,” I said. Finished with my hair, I laid my silver-backed brush on the dressing table. “Yet I am still unconvinced that your messages tie in the way you think they do.”
“And I cannot deny the logic in your thinking,” he said. “Before you utter a single word, I must make it clear that I categorically refuse to entertain your notion about secret societies.”
I shrugged. “I won’t bother to argue.”
“That’s more alarming than your forcing the idea on me. What are you up to?”
“Nothing, darling,” I said. “I shan’t trouble you with my silly little thoughts until I’ve uncovered enough overwhelming evidence to convince even you.”
“I have never, ever accused you of being silly.” His cheeks darkened and his eyes flashed.
“One must, on occasion, draw one’s own conclusions,” I said. “At any rate, what’s most important now is to determine which of the men who died in Mr. Crofton’s mine left behind a family with murderous impulses. And then we shall have to see if he knew either Lizzie Hopman or Mrs. Grummidge.”
“And how do you propose doing that?” he asked.
“By going to Wales, of course.”
* * *
By morning, Colin had convinced me that a trip to Wales was not necessary, although I must admit to regretting it just a bit. I’d always wanted to see the Brecon Beacons. Not, mind you, that I would have included a sightseeing excursion as part of a murder investigation, but if one is in the area, one might as well take advantage of the scenery. Rather than go ourselves, he put Inspector Pickering on the case, ordering him to liaise via telephone with his Welsh counterparts in the village where the mine was located and get them to conduct interviews as appropriate. The village being nowhere near the Brecon Beacons had no impact whatsoever on my agreeing to this scheme.
That settled, Colin went off to Marlborough House, leaving me at loose ends until a message arrived from Mrs. Crofton, asking if I would call on her at my earliest convenience. I had hoped for the opportunity to speak to her again, after the initial shock of her husband’s death had passed, but had not dreamed she would reach out to me, especially so quickly.
Her butler was not quite so rude to me as he had been the previous day. I credit this to the icy stare I gave him when he opened the door. The tone in which I demanded to see his mistress might have played a small role, too. He seemed the sort of man who reacted to a firm hand rather than kindness, an observation that made me feel a bit sorry for him.
Mrs. Crofton received me in a chamber so unlike her gold sitting room I could hardly reconcile the two spaces being contained in the same house. This, she explained, was her sewing room, although I saw no sign of any of the implements required for that task. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant little space, its walls painted a rosy pink, with a collection of charming watercolors hanging on them. I complimented her on the paintings, and she blushed so fiercely I wondered if she had painted them herself.
She had abandoned her ruffles and lace for a simple mourning gown, but here, again, she surprised me. I would have expected her to select something covered in a profusion of jet beads, but instead the black crêpe was unadorned except for a simple black braided trim around the high collar and the cuffs of the sleeves. Yesterday, her hands had been covered with rings—one a diamond so large it would have been better suited to a royal crown—but now the only jewelry she wore was a thin gold wedding band and an oval pendant that contained a clipping of what I assumed was her late husband’s hair.
The absence of rouge and pearl powder from her face revealed her to be much younger than I had guessed when I first met her. She was past the first flush of youth, but could not have been more than thirty years old. Mr. Crofton, if I recalled correctly, was sixty-three at the time of his death.
I gave her my condolences and accepted her offer of a cup of tea. Her hands were shaking as she lifted the pot.
“Thank you for coming, Lady Emily,” she said. “I am afraid you might have formed an incorrect impression of me when you called yesterday. You must understand that Mr. Crofton was a gentleman with very specific tastes, and as he has always been good to me, I was quite content to give him what he wanted. No doubt you have noticed that he was substantially older than I, but I assure you that in no way mattered to either of us. Ours was a marriage based on affection.”
“There is no question you were fond of him.”
“I loved him, too,” she said, swallowing hard. “In a way.”
“You need not justify anything to me,” I said, not entirely sure what to make of her appearing so unlike the lady I had seen yesterday. If it weren’t for the murders of Mr. Grummidge and Mr. Casby, it would be tempting to wonder if she had killed her husband so that she could live a less vulgar life. My mother, certainly, would have approved of that motive for murder. “I am pleased that you wrote to me, although I admit to being surprised by your message. Is there something I can do for you?”
“No, I don’t need anything. I’ll be comfortable enough for the rest of my life. My husband made sure of that. I just didn’t want you to think that I was … that … I should not have said what I did about the queen yesterday.”
“That is of no consequence whatsoever.” I wondered what was really worrying her. Surely an offhand (and, admittedly, tacky, embarrassing, and wholly unrealistic) comment about wanting to be a lady-in-waiting made to a total stranger was not the sort of thing over which one would obsess after one’s husband had been murdered. “I would have got in touch before long regardless as I had hoped to ask you some questions that might help us find the person who did this to Mr. Crofton. Did he have any enemies?”
“Only every person in Wales after the mine disaster,” she said. “But why should he be held responsible? He’d never even been to the bloody—excuse me—place, and I’m sure he did whatever one is supposed to do to make a mine safe.”
It was not the fact that she cursed that tripped me up, but the slightest hint of an accent I had not noticed before. Her vowels, just for a moment, made her sound Welsh. “Do you know Wales well?” I asked.
“I’ve never been there and have no interest in going.” Her voice was back to the upper-class drawl she had affected before.
“Had anyone contacted him recently about the disaster? Some of the miners’ families, perhaps?”
“No, that’s all done and dusted,” she said, her tone clipped and callous. “He paid them off, you know. What else could he have done?”
“It was good of him to offer the families compensation,” I said. “Not everyone would have done. It is possible, however, that someone amongst the victims’ families still bears a grudge and wanted to do to him what he—or rather, the mine—had done to his loved one.”
“That’s absurd.” She shrank a bit in her seat. “Isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily. I’m sure that at the moment you are experiencing a tumult of emotions you can hardly make sense of. The miners’ families would have gone through something similar when dealing with their grief, and now, months later, one among them may have decided he wanted revenge.”
“An inspector from Scotland Yard—Gale was his name—was here yesterday and went through all Mr. Crofton’s papers but said there was nothing pertinent to his … to his … to anything.”
That the wretched Inspector Gale would reach an unsatisfactory conclusion came as no surprise. The man was probably interested in nothing that did not mention Bertie by name. “Did you notice anything unusual in the past few weeks? Was your husband behaving differently? Did he seem troubled by anything?”
“I told him Mr. Crofton had been at his club most of the day that he died, but apparently he never actually went there. Other than that, I know nothing. We’ve only been in London for a bit over a week, having planned to stop briefly en route to Egypt, where we had arranged to spend the rest of the winter. I’m fascinated by Cleopatra and want to see her tomb. We were to sail from Southampton tomorrow.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that no one has been able to determine the location of Cleopatra’s tomb. The famous queen was exactly who I would have guessed inspired the Mrs. Crofton I met yesterday, but the widow sitting in front of me now struck me as someone who would prefer copying the elegant paintings found on the sepulcher walls in the Valley of the Kings. Realizing I was letting my imagination run away with me—I had not, after all, confirmed that she had done the watercolors in her charming sewing room—I shook myself back to the present. “How many people knew of your plans?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. Our staff, of course, and our friends.”
“Would you object to me taking a look at your husband’s papers, just as Inspector Gale did? I find I often notice things that men overlook.”
She reacted to my pointed tone exactly as I’d hoped she would, with a flash in her hazel eyes and a quick grin. “Come, I’ll take you now.”
Mr. Crofton’s wood-paneled study was more in keeping with the gold sitting room than his wife’s sewing room. It was evocative of the stereotype of a gentleman’s club, with leather chairs and a marble fireplace, but a hulking suit of armor—far too large for any man to ever have worn; it was at least seven and a half feet tall—rather spoiled the effect. A large desk stood in the center of the room, and it was there that I focused my efforts. I went through every sheet of paper on its surface and everything in each of its drawers, but found nothing that even my fertile imagination could connect to his death.
“I don’t see anything related to the disaster at the mine,” I said. “Did he have an office as well, not in the house?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Crofton wasn’t much interested in business,” his widow said. “The mine was an investment, that’s all. All part of how he kept me in the manner to which he wanted me to be accustomed. That and a host of other things he mentioned from time to time—something about the ’change, I believe—were how he made his money, but he was not involved in the day-to-day operation of the mine or anything else. He was a gentleman, Lady Emily.”
I appreciated the nuance of her choice of word, but at the same time understood that Mr. Crofton could not, in the most technical sense of the word, have been a gentleman. He earned his money. For although I saw no documents referring to the accident, I did see numerous letters, memos, and reports about the mine that made it clear he was at the center of decision-making for the business. This added support to my theory that someone from the mine was involved with his murder.
But who? The connection between Ned Traddles, Lizzie Hopman, and Violet Grummidge could not be anything less than critically important. I thought of the fourth and final costume Mr. Carson had made for the elusive Mr. Smith. Who, posed as Harold Godwinson slain in battle, would fall victim to our vigilante next?
After making note of a few details concerning the running of the mine, I thanked Mrs. Crofton and asked her to reach out to me if she thought of anything further that might shed light on her husband’s death.
“Of course,” she replied. “May I ask your advice on a point that has been troubling me? Would it be too bad of me to go to Egypt as I’d planned? There’s nothing more I can do here for poor Mr. Crofton, and I do hate to let the steamer tickets and all our arrangements go to waste.”
I need hardly say that I managed to hide my absolute astonishment at her words. Not that I judged her for her unusual behavior; I understood all too well that we all mourn in our own ways. Furthermore, I believe the restrictions forced on new widows by Society are excessive. Yet I could not help being shocked that she wanted to rush off to Egypt so quickly. It was impossible Mr. Crofton could be buried before the boat left Southampton.
“My only advice would be to stay in London until Scotland Yard have released your husband’s remains for burial. After that, if they need nothing further from you, I don’t see that anyone can keep you from your trip.”
She nodded, her eyes narrowing. “I shall ring Inspector Gale at once and ask him to hurry things along. Thank you, Lady Emily.”
My carriage was waiting outside the house, but I sent it home without me in it, preferring to walk back to Park Lane. I’ve always found a brisk constitutional clears the mind and allows for more efficient ratiocination. On this occasion, however, I had not managed to reconcile my thoughts about Mrs. Crofton by the time I reached my house. I made two superfluous circuits of the block without being able to come to a satisfactory conclusion about her contradictory nature. As I approached my stoop and prepared to continue around the block yet again, I saw Colin standing in the library window. He waved and motioned for me to come inside, holding up an envelope as an added incentive.