T Kinsey - A Quiet Life in the Country (A Lady Hardcastle Mystery Book 1)

As our eating slowed in pace and the savoury course drew to a natural close, the bell from the dining room rang. The housemaid slipped out, carrying a tray of cakes and pastries.

They asked me about Lady Hardcastle, where we’d come from, how we were settling in, and what we were up to now. I answered truthfully as much as I could, but not fully. I did let them know we were trying to find out about the murder of Frank Pickering, though.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Langdon. ‘Poor Mr Pickering. He worked for Seddons, you know. A fine young man. More of a gentleman in manner than his employer if you ask me.’

‘You met him?’ I asked.

‘Yes, once or twice. I usually accompany Mr Seddon on business trips as his valet and Mr Pickering was sometimes there or thereabouts. He came to the house once.’

‘To the house? Isn’t that a little unusual?’

‘It was, rather. It was quite recently, too.’

‘Have you any idea why?’

‘None at all, I’m afraid. Opportunities for eavesdropping aren’t quite what they were in some of the houses I’ve worked in. Thick walls and doors, you see. He didn’t seem in the best of spirits when he arrived and he saw himself out, slamming the door as he went, so I can’t presume it was a joyful meeting.’

I was about to try to press him for more details when the bell rang from the dining room again.

‘I expect that’ll be for me,’ he said, getting up. ‘Please leave me a piece of trifle if you can spare it. I’m rather partial to trifle.’

He went off towards the dining room and our conversation lightened once more, turning to stories about the antics of the younger servants.

When he returned, we were still laughing at a story told by Doris the kitchen maid – with actions and comic voices. He came over to my chair and spoke discreetly in my ear. ‘It was for you, actually, my dear. Lady Hardcastle asks if you’d take her her pills.’

‘Of course. Thank you,’ I said, rising from my chair. ‘Please excuse me, everyone. Duty calls.’

I found my bag and rummaged inside. Lady Hardcastle didn’t take ‘pills’ but she clearly wanted me in the dining room for some reason. I carried a box of aspirin, which would suffice, and I took out two of the little pills and went towards the door I’d seen Langdon use.

‘Straight up the passage, turn right and it’s the second door on the left,’ said Mrs Birch. ‘Follow the sound of self-important bragging and you won’t go far wrong.’

The panelled passageway was hung with watercolours of ships and the harbour at Bristol, interspersed with polished-brass nameplates. There was a binnacle beside the dining room door, complete with compass, with a brass ship’s bell mounted on a shelf above it. If I’d been asked to identify the theme of the decor I should definitely have plumped for ‘nautical’.

The room was large, high ceilinged and decorated in fashionably pale shades of blue. It might have been elegant but for the continuation of the clumsily nautical theme. Around the wall were more items of memorabilia: polished portholes; another bell, this one slightly dented; framed bills of lading; an intriguingly asymmetrical display of blocks and lines from a ship’s rigging; more paintings of ships; and there, in pride of place above the fireplace, a large portrait in oils of Mrs Seddon in regal pose.

My experience of the houses of the gentry was that their decor tended towards the chaotic. Inherited items jostled for space with treasured mementoes. Knick-knacks were collected capriciously and displayed haphazardly. Themed rooms, where there were any, tended to be bedrooms: ‘The Chinese Room’, ‘The African Room’. There was something altogether too staged about the Seddon home. Someone, I thought, was trying just a little too hard. If the servants were to be believed, it wasn’t difficult to guess who it was.

The dining table was large enough to seat ten but there were only six for lunch. Mr Seddon sat at the head of the table with his wife to his right. Lady Hardcastle sat opposite her, with a chubby, red-faced gentleman I didn’t recognize to her left. The man bore a vague familial resemblance to Mr Seddon – his younger brother, perhaps. A similarly plump lady that I presumed was his own wife sat opposite him.

A dreary-looking man in his early twenties sat next to the plump lady. ‘I say, Aunt Margaret, would you mind passing me the butter?’

‘The what, dear?’ said the lady.

‘The butter.’

‘Where is it?’

‘By your elbow,’ said the young man. His tone had acquired an arrogant impatience which seemed at odds with his dreary, vapid appearance.

The young man rolled his eyes as he buttered a last piece of bread roll.

Mary, the housemaid, was pouring tea. Their lunch, the remains of which were piled on the sideboard, appeared to have been a more modest version of the one I had just enjoyed. I smiled to myself.

‘Ah, Armstrong,’ said Lady Hardcastle beckoning me over. ‘Thank you so much.’

I gave her the aspirins and she swallowed them down. She thanked me again and waved me away. Instead of leaving, though, I made full use of the mystical powers of invisibility possessed by all household servants and slipped unnoticed to the corner of the room.

‘You poor thing,’ said Mrs Seddon. ‘Are they for nerves? It must be the shock of talking about that terrible business.’

Mrs Seddon was in her early fifties, I judged, slim of figure and blond of hair. Pretty, I thought, but not truly beautiful. Her clothes were on the gaudy side of elegant, but undoubtedly expensive.

She spoke again. ‘We were simply horrified to hear of his death,’ she said. ‘How much more awful it must have been to actually find his . . . body. Was it suicide, do they think?’

‘That’s certainly how it was intended to appear,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘but the police weren’t convinced. They’ve arrested a local man for the murder.’

‘Murder? Did you know about this, James?’ she asked her husband sharply before turning back to Lady Hardcastle. ‘He used to work for James, you know,’ she explained.

‘I . . . er . . . yes, my dear. I think I heard something about it,’ he stammered nervously.

‘You never said anything.’ Her tone was distinctly icy by now.

‘I . . . I . . . didn’t want to vex you unduly, my sweet. Nasty business. Nasty.’

Mr Seddon might have been the senior partner of a successful shipping agency, but it was becoming clear who was the senior partner in the Seddon household.

‘Don’t want to speak ill of a chap when he’s lying on the slab at the mortuary and all that,’ said the red-faced man, slightly drunkenly, ‘but it’s dashed inconvenient his dying like that. Left us in the lurch, what?’

‘Oh, Percy, don’t,’ said the unknown lady. ‘You speak as though he got himself murdered on purpose.’

‘Unless he was the victim of a lunatic, m’dear,’ he said, ‘he must have upset someone. Could say he brought it on himself, what?’

‘No, one couldn’t,’ she replied sternly. ‘And I think you’ve had altogether quite enough to drink.’

There was an embarrassed silence during which everyone but the red-faced man sipped at their tea; he mutinously carried on with his wine. The silence dragged on for almost a minute before Mrs Seddon said, ‘Oh, my dear Lady Hardcastle, you do look quite ill. Are you sure you’re all right? Should I call a doctor?’

Lady Hardcastle looked absolutely fine to me, but it was an elegant way of giving her a reason to excuse herself early. She took it. ‘Thank you, Mrs Seddon, I’m sure I’ll be fine. But might I impose upon your generosity a little further and ask your chauffeur to drive me home?’

‘Of course you may, of course,’ said Mrs Seddon, with barely concealed relief. ‘Mary, please go back to the kitchen and tell Daniel to ready the Rolls. You can clear this up later.’