Anne Perry - A Christmas Homecoming

She bent and looked to see if anything could have fallen onto the floor and slid under the bed. She lifted the heavy drapes, but found nothing, not even dust.

Lastly she looked at the coal bucket by the fire, and into the cold grate. If she had received a note to keep an appointment at night, secretly, she would have burned it. It was the easiest and surest destruction.

There was a faint crust of gray ash at the edge of the cinders. But whatever the paper was it had burned through and curled over, subsiding on itself. If she touched it at all, even breathed on it, it would collapse into a heap of ash. However, she was sure it must have been a small note. But there was no way to prove it.

So Ballin had received the invitation, or the summons. The other person had come prepared, carrying the weapon.

She stiffened as she heard footsteps outside in the corridor, and a maid’s laughter. Surely Mr. Netheridge would have told the servants not to come into Ballin’s room?

Or would he? Would he even think of it? He had probably never experienced anything to do with murder before. Very few people had. Caroline must do something before the maid disturbed anything, and then tell Mr. Netheridge that the room ought to remain untouched.

She opened the door and came face-to-face with one of the housemaids, a tall girl with dark hair. The girl gave a little shriek and stepped backward sharply.

“I’m sorry,” Caroline apologized. “I wanted to make sure that nothing had been disturbed here. Mr. Netheridge requests that you do not come into this room, under any circumstances. Do you understand?”

“Yes … yes, ma’am,” the girl said obediently.

Caroline wondered whether she should ask Eliza to lock the door. But if she did that, the maids would wonder where Ballin was. Perhaps it could be explained as an infectious disease? Would that be enough, or could curiosity still get the better of someone, driving them to look around the room?

Then again, how much did it matter? There was nothing in there, except the curled-over ash remnant of a note, which no one could read now anyway.

“Thank you.” She smiled at the girl and then came out into the passage, closing the door behind her. She would find Eliza immediately and apologize for giving her staff orders, and explain to her the necessity.

Eliza looked surprised when Caroline told her. “I … I never thought of it,” she admitted. “Mr. Netheridge thought it better not to tell them anything, which I find very difficult. They will not see Mr. Ballin, and they know perfectly well that he cannot have left. No one could.” She bit her lip. “If they ask me, and the butler certainly will, what should I say?”

“I think perhaps that Mr. Ballin is ill and must not on any account be disturbed. Also that we are not certain if what he has might be contagious. But I would add that only if necessary.”

“Then why do we not feed him?” Eliza said reasonably. “Even the sick need to eat and drink, and also have their bed linen changed.”

“Perhaps we may know the truth before such an issue is obvious,” Caroline said gravely. “If not, perhaps then it will be time to tell them the truth we have.”

“Where could he be?” Eliza’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Well, he has not returned to a mysterious coffin somewhere,” Caroline assured her. “But we do need to know as much of the truth as possible, for our own safety, and to prevent any further tragedies.”

“Will it prevent tragedy?” Eliza looked at her candidly. “One of us here in this house must have killed him. There’s no one else, and there is no possibility whatever that it was suicide or accident. He could not have done that to himself; even I can see that. Who carries around a broom handle carved to a spear point in the middle of the night, unless they intend to kill someone?”

“Nobody,” Caroline agreed. “And we will all be afraid and wondering until we find out who did it. Do you think there is any chance we can forget it and carry on as normal until the snow thaws and the police can arrive, and ask us all the same questions we can ask now, except days later when we don’t remember anything as sharply?”

“No. So what can we do?”

“There are three things we can agree about,” Caroline answered. “Who had the ability to kill him: that is, the means? Who had the opportunity: In other words, where were we all at the time it must have happened? And who would want to: Who believed they had not only a reason, but no better way of dealing with it?”

Eliza frowned. “Can we really find all that out?”

“We can certainly try,” Caroline said with more conviction than she felt. “We know that Mr. Ballin was killed some time after we parted to go to bed, and when I went down again to fetch the note I had left behind on the stage.”

“What times were those?” Eliza asked. They were standing on the landing at the top of the stairs, talking quietly. No one else seemed to be around. Housemaids were busy. Footmen must have been in the servants’ quarters and would come only if the doorbell rang, which at the moment was impossible. Kitchen staff would be busy preparing luncheon for the household, which—including servants—was well over twenty people.

“We went to bed at quarter to eleven,” Caroline answered. “I went down to get my note just before midnight.”

“An hour and a quarter, roughly,” Eliza said. “Everyone would be in their bedrooms, or say they were. How does one prove that?”

“Well, I know where Joshua was and he knows where I was,” Caroline reasoned. “You and Mr. Netheridge could account for each other, as could Mercy and James.” She stopped, seeing a shadow in Eliza’s face. “What is it?” she said more gently.

“Charles and I do not share a bedroom,” Eliza confessed, as if it were some kind of sin. She looked deeply uncomfortable. She seemed to be struggling for an explanation, but no words came.

“I’m sorry,” Caroline apologized. “In a house this size of course you would not need to. In the later years of my first marriage, I did not share a bedroom with my husband.” She smiled briefly; the memory no longer hurt. “He was very restless. I share with Joshua now because we’re both happy doing so, and also we do not have the means to do otherwise most of the time, especially when we are traveling.”

Eliza smiled and blinked. “You are very generous. It must be an interesting life, going to so many places, meeting people, performing different plays. You can never be bored.”

“I’m not.” Caroline wondered how much of the truth to tell. “But I am quite often lonely, because I am not part of the cast.”

Eliza looked amazed. “But you are. You are involved.”

“Not usually. This is in many senses an amateur production … or, it was. We were to make our own scenery, and I was taught how to work the lights. In an ordinary professional production there is no work for me, except sometimes to help Joshua learn his lines. I speak the other parts to cue him. Otherwise I have nothing in particular to do, and we are away from home a lot.”

“But you are happy,” Eliza said, smiling. “I can see it in your face, and in the way you look at him, and he at you.”

Caroline wanted to thank her, make some gracious acknowledgment, but the sudden rush of gratitude she felt had brought tears to her eyes and a tightness to her throat that made it momentarily impossible to speak. She had risked so much in marrying Joshua: the horror of her family, the outrage of her former mother-in-law, the loss of most of her friends and certainly any place in the society to which she had been accustomed through most of her life. She had been respectable, and financially safe. Now she was neither. But she was certainly happier, and she was very aware that Joshua loved her in a way Edward Ellison never had.