Джорджетт Хейер - Envious Casca

"I don't know at all," said Stephen. "I shall leave it to the Inspector to find out."

"That's all very well!" struck in Paula. "But if there were no finger-prints on the case, how is he to find out?"

"He seems quite optimistic about it," Stephen replied.

It now seemed good to Valerie to declare in agitated tones that she could see what they were all getting at, but if anyone thought she had killed Mr. Herriard they were wrong, and she wished that she had never been born.

Mrs. Dean, whom Stephen's announcement had cast into a mood of bitter reflection, was forced to wrench herself from her thoughts to frustrate an attempt on her daughter's part to break into strong hysterics. Valerie cast herself on the scented bosom in a storm of noisy tears, saying that everyone had been beastly to her ever since she Iiad set foot in this beastly house; and, with the exception of Joseph, who fussed about in an agitated and useless manner, the rest of the party lost no time in dispersing.

Maud told Mathilda, on her placid way to the morning-room, that she thought it was a good thing Stephen was not going to marry Valerie, since she seemed an uncontrolled girl, not at all likely to make him comfortable. She seemed to have no comment to make on the new and lurid light thrown on to Nathaniel's murder, and Mathilda was unable to resist the impulse to ask her if she had grasped the meaning of what Stephen had told them.

"Oh yes!" Maud said. "I always thought something like that must have happened."

Mathilda fairly gasped. "You thought it? You never said so!"

"No, dear. I make a point of not interfering," Maud explained.

"I must confess it hadn't occurred to me that any of us could be quite so base!" Mathilda said.

Maud's face was quite inscrutable. "Hadn't it?" she said, uninterested and unsurprised.

Valerie, meanwhile, had been led upstairs, gustily sobbing, by her mother, who vented her own annoyance at having so precipitately jettisoned Stephen on Joseph, telling him that although she was never one to make trouble she felt bound to say that her girlie had been treated at Lexham with a total lack of consideration.

Poor Joseph was stricken to incoherence by the injustice of this accusation, and could only gaze after the matron in shocked bewilderment. He was recalled to a sense of his surroundings by the entrance of the servants, to clear the table, and went away to look for someone with whom he could discuss the latest developments of the case.

He was fortunate enough to find Mathilda, and at once took her by the arm and led her off to the library. "I'm getting old, Tilda - too old for this kind of thing!" he told her. "Yesterday I thought that if only the cloud could be lifted from Stephen, nothing else would matter. Today I find myself with a possibility so horrible - Tilda, who, I ask of you, could bear such a grudge against Stephen?"

"It might not be so much a question of a grudge as an instinct of pure sauve qui petit," she pointed out.

"No one but a snake in the grass could do such a thing!" She said dryly: "Anyone capable of stabbing his host in the back would surely be quite capable of throwing the blame on to someone else."

"Mottisfont?" he said. "Roydon? Paula? How can you think such a thing of any one of them?"

"I envy you your touching faith in human nature, Joe."

She was sorry, however, that she had said that, for Joseph took it as a cue, and said in a very noble way that he thanked God he had got faith in human nature. While she did not doubt that his trusting disposition had sustained a severe shock, and could even be sorry for his distress, she was in no mood to tolerate play-acting, and soon shook him off. Between his relief at knowing Stephen to be exonerated and his dread of discovering that his beloved niece, or his old friend Mottisfont, or poor young Roydon was the guilty party, he was so spiritually torn that the optimism of a lifetime seemed to be in danger of deserting him.

Of the three people now, presumably, equally suspected of having murdered Nathaniel, Paula showed the most coolness. She discussed, with a cold-bloodedness worthy of Stephen, the chances of Roydon's having done the deed, and said that, speaking from an artistic point of view, she hoped that he hadn't, since he had a Future before him.

"I imagine I must be out of the running," she said, walking about the room in her usual restless way. "No one could suspect me of trying to throw the blame on to my own brother! If there had been any bequests to them in Uncle's will, I should have said that one of the servants had done it, probably Ford; but as it is they none of them had the slightest motive." She turned her brilliant gaze upon Mathilda, adding impulsively: "If one wasn't a suspect oneself, wouldn't it be interesting, Mathilda? I think I could actually enjoy it!"

"Neither Joe nor I are suspects, and I can assure you we aren't enjoying it!" said Mathilda.

"Oh, Joe! He's an escapist," said Paula scornfully. "But you! You ought to be able to appreciate a situation that shows us all up in the raw!"

"I don't think," said Mathilda, "that I care for seeing my friends in the raw."

"I believe that this experience will be very valuable to me as an artist," said Paula.

But Mathilda had never felt less inclined to listen to a dissertation on the benefits of experience to an actress, and she very rudely told Paula to try it on the dog.

It was now nearly eleven o'clock, and all the discomforts of a morning spent in a country house with nothing to do were being suffered by Lexham's unwilling guests. Outside, a grey sky and melting snow offered little inducement to would-be walkers; inside, a general hush brooded over the house; and everyone was uneasily aware of Scotland Yard's presence. While suspicion had centred upon Stephen, everyone else had been ready to discuss the murder in all its aspects; now that Stephen had apparently been exonerated, and the field was left open for his successor, an uneasy shrinking from all mention of the crime was visible in everyone except Paula. Even Mrs. Dean did not speak of it. She joined Maud in the morning-room presently, and, without receiving the slightest encouragement, favoured her with the story of her life, not omitting a list of her unsuccessful suitors, the personal idiosyncrasies of the late Mr. Dean, and all the more repulsive details of two confinements and a miscarriage.

Roydon, who had mumbled something about getting a breath of fresh air, had gone up to his room, on leaving the breakfast-table, thus making an enemy of the second housemaid, who had only just made his bed, and wanted to bring in the vacuum-cleaner. Being a well-trained servant, she withdrew, and went off to complain bitterly to the head-housemaid about visitors who knew no better than to come up before they were wanted, putting one all behind with one's work. The head-housemaid said it was funny, him coming up to his room at this hour; and on these meagre grounds a rumour spread rapidly through the servants' quarters that that Mr. Roydon was looking ever so queer, and behaving so strange that no one wouldn't be surprised to hear that it was him all the time who had done in the master.

All this made a very agreeable subject for conversation at the eleven-o'clock gathering for tea in the kitchen and the hall; and when one of the under-gardeners joined the kitchen-party with a trug of vegetables for the cook, he was able to enliven the discussion by recounting that it was a funny thing, them speaking of young Roydon like they were, for he had himself just seen him going off for a walk on his own. He had come upon him down by the potting-sheds and the manure-heap, and he had somehow thought it was queer, finding him there, and Roydon hadn't half started when he had seen him coming round the corner of the shed. Adjured by two housemaids, one tweeny, and the kitchenmaid, all with their eyes popping out of their heads, to continue this exciting narrative, he said that it was his belief young Roydon had been burning something in the incinerator, because he had been standing close to it, for one thing, and for another he'd take his oath he'd heard someone putting the lid on it.