CHAPTER 24
A MOUNTAIN OF WORRIES
THE NEXT MORNING, Dot rattled us awake by dropping the fire tongs.
“How is Stephen?” I said from my bed.
“Just the same, miss. He looks like death. Meaning, I’ll be doing his work as well as my own. Next to impossible, it being Christmas week. Near impossible already, even without clodhopping policemen around every corner.” She wiped her cloth along the mantelpiece, squinted at it and sighed. “I do forty-one fire grates every day of my life,” she said. “And then I’ve got the soot grime and ash-dust to look after. It’s a never-ending story. Not even mentioning poor Frederick’s troubles with that inspector. Did he ever see the special emerald? And what was Mr. Sivam wearing? And has he got a need for money? Well, don’t we all?”
She poured us each a cup of cocoa—but no tray today, she said. There was a perfectly good breakfast waiting in the breakfast room. “Master Hector is already dressed and gone downstairs.”
Lucy began to count strokes as she brushed her hair. “Three, four, five…”
“Stephen usually sleeps on a mat near the oven,” said Dot. “For now, he’s been put in the butler’s pantry, so’s we can watch him but also keep him out of the way. Except it’s Mr. Pressman’s private spot, and he’s an ogre when peeved, I’ll tell you straight. The doctor says Stephen’s got hisself concussed in the skull. No bones broken, but horrible bruises! I had a peek first thing—his eyes is all swolled up and purple, like a mask.”
I shivered.
“His head is wrapped up with brown paper soaked in vinegar. He don’t half smell like a jar of pickles.”
“Just like Jack,” I said. “And Jill. Bumped his head and went to bed.”
Lucy’s punishing brushstrokes made her hair crackle. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen…What about the prisoner?” she said.
“Oh, Miss Day’s all right,” said Dot. “Mrs. Frost said only porridge, as she’s a prisoner, but Archer and me, we like Miss Day, she’s as nice as sugar, so we take turns going up and slipping her buns and whatnot. The sergeant on guard, he don’t mind. He likes her too.” Dot waggled her eyebrows up and down. “I mean, he likes her.”
Lucy tried to copy the eyebrow maneuver but she looked demented.
“I’d best be off.” Dot collected our mugs. “We had a bit of an uproar below stairs last evening,” she said, pausing at the door. “Lords and ladies can’t have all the fun, can they? Effie—she’s scullery—and Archer, they saw out the window what seemed to be some sort of hunchbacked monster, swaying against the coalhouse door, clutching his head and staggering like he were a lunatic.”
“Go on!” said Lucy, eyes round.
“Lucky that Mr. Mooney happened along. He nipped straight out to investigate without a smidgen of fear. ‘Stay away from the windows!’ he says to us, and we ducked down giggling, but leery too. He was gone ever so long, we thought he might be doing battle. And what do you think it was?” Dot hushed her voice to a spooky whisper.
We shook our heads, waiting to hear. Lucy had stopped brushing.
Dot cackled. “He found the coalhouse door swinging open and shut, with an empty coal sack caught in a hinge and flapping. ‘Here’s your monster,’ says Mr. Mooney, and he plunks down the sack on the kitchen table. He flashed that smile of his what Archer says could melt a block of ice.”
“A coal sack?” I said.
Lucy picked up her brush again. “Fancy thinking it was a monster,” she said.
“I’m hungry.” I threw back my coverlet. “Time to get dressed.”
Hector waved cheerily when we came in. But he was sitting with Dr. Musselman at the far end of the table, so I sat next to my grandmother. She was happily eating a kipper and listening to Marjorie read aloud from last evening’s Torquay Voice. Mrs. Sivam held her hands over her ears. She said the only news she wished to hear was that her husband was safe and sound.
“ ‘Miss Chatsworth revealed that blood had seeped’—” Marjorie stopped reading because James put up a hand to request a pause.
“Now that you girls are here,” he said, “I may voice my disappointment.”
My heart doubled in weight and turned over inside my chest. Disappointing James was a dreadful feeling. But Lucy! She wiggled herself right next to Marjorie so as to read along with her.
“Good thing I came with you yesterday,” she said to me. “What I told that man was important enough to put in the newspaper!”
“That is precisely where you’ve let the family down,” said James, in his sternest tone. “It was a mistake to let Aggie meet with him, but far, far worse that you tricked us into tagging along—and then blabbed! I will say this one last time, Lucy…We. Do. Not. Speak. With. Reporters.”
Lucy paled and then flushed bright pink. I felt a tinge of empathy. I’d made the same mistake in October, starting with a thrill down my spine at the sight of my name in a news article and ending with wishing to shrivel up like a poked worm.
And the same reporter had been wielding the pencil.
“He did come from Torquay because of Hector and me,” I said, clutching at a defense of Lucy’s actions—even if I had tried to stop her.
“And he did write a better story than the local chap did,” said Marjorie, “using a bit of ingenuity with the same lack of information.”
“No one could say that Mr. Fibbley is not clever,” I said.
“The point is,” said James, “that Mr. Fibbley had rather more information than the local chap, thanks to our little chatterbox.”
I confess to feeling some comfort in Lucy being the one to cause trouble instead of me. I served myself a waffle, covered with a syrup made of the sap from maple trees and imported all the way from Canada.
James gave Lucy an ultimatum after breakfast.
“You are fortunate that your grandmother does not care for the daily news—or, indeed, for any reference to our presence in the twentieth century. I will not tell her that you’ve been sharing family secrets. In exchange, you will read aloud whatever she requests until lunchtime.”
Off Lucy went with her lower lip stuck out far enough to catch flies, as my nursemaid Charlotte would say. Goodness, I hadn’t missed Charlotte for one minute since I’d arrived at Owl Park. I wondered whether Christmas with her mother had been the ordinary sort, with a roast goose and carol singing and no dead body in the library. Was she feverishly writing letters to Constable Beck every evening? Had she told her mother about the young man with whom she’d been walking out?
“Aggie?” said Marjorie. “Are you two coming?” She meant to the morning room, where she and Grannie and Kitty Sivam were heading.
“I suppose.”
Hector and I would have much preferred to find a policeman to follow about, or to search the house ourselves for the magnifying glass and the blood-smeared shirt, but alas…
Back in the morning room—though it was nearly past morning—Grannie Jane was sorting through her skeins of wool. Marjorie rang for tea and sat at her desk to write. Snow continued to blow against the windows and boredom wormed its way into the room like smoke from an ill-burning fire. Grannie’s needles began the clickety-clacking that accompanied most of our quiet hours. Hector turned the pages of a book, hoping to find a pressed flower. I wished for Tony’s nose to be lying across my boot and his tail to thump as we listened to the familiar clicks of Grannie knitting.
Mrs. Sivam draped herself upon the chaise, her neck on the headrest, her face glowering at the ceiling. “I keep thinking of that thieving actress,” she said, “making such a noise, while her victim—one of her victims, since I am the other—has disappeared without a trace and the police seem not to care one bit.”
“I see that it must feel that way,” said Marjorie, “while you are so distraught, but James tells me that the police from four other villages are assisting the Tiverton constabulary. There is plenty of activity beyond what we’re aware of. Your motorcar is still in the coach house, rather penned in by tableaux scenery, so he has not gone off in that. Which means on foot or by train, unless he was picked up in somebody’s coach. The police keep asking questions, hoping that a witness will come forward.”
“So many questions, and no answers!” complained Kitty.
I leaned on Marjorie’s shoulders, nuzzling her cheek with my cheek, trying to see what she was writing.
“Aggie,” she said. “You’re making my script go wobbly.”
“Are you writing to Mummy?” I said.
“Yes.”
“And you’re telling her? About Mr. Corker?”
“I feel I must,” said Marjorie, glancing at Grannie Jane. “Even if Mummy doesn’t read the newspaper herself, most people do. Someone is bound to think it a duty to pay a call and tell her all about it.”
“She’ll know I wrote a letter full of untruths,” I said, “and I only fibbed because you said I must.”
“We did not realize that a reporter would come all the way from Torquay to make such a fuss,” said Marjorie. “We thought we were protecting her from worry.”
I slumped on an ottoman with a glum conscience.
Mr. Pressman appeared at the door to offer a welcome instant of anticipation. Why had he come? What might happen next?
Mummy had arrived, bringing Tony with her, unable to bear another day without us…The police had found another clue, this time a ruby necklace with a broken clasp…Mr. Lakshay Sivam had been sighted, running along the top of a train between Leeds and Durham…Mr. Lakshay Sivam had been arrested, a passenger in a coach carrying the post to Scotland…
“Yes, Pressman?” said Marjorie. “Did I hear the bell ring?”
“Indeed, my lady. There is a woman come calling, without a card. I put her in the drawing room to wait, but…I don’t know.”
“What troubles you, Pressman?” Marjorie put down her teacup and saucer. “Who is she?”
“Her name is Miss Beatrice Truitt, my lady. She is wearing heavy mourning. She is apparently betrothed to marry the corpse.”