Authors: A Mortal Curiosity
Ann Granger (35 page)
I was perhaps too harsh on Lefebre. His situation had been a difficult one. Who doesn’t hide some awkward fact, perhaps to oblige a friend? Who doesn’t hesitate to make a statement that will ‘set the cat among the pigeons’? What medical man is not cautious in his diagnosis? How can he discuss someone who may be his patient with an outsider? But I still felt that Lefebre had somehow misled me at Shore House.
Ben would say, of course, that half of London flies under false colours, if not all of the time, then at least some of it. It is the way of the world. Perhaps he’s right. He told me that just before he came down to Hampshire, he had charged a dreadful man with deliberately abandoning a baby of eighteen months on King’s Cross station. The plight of all the unwanted children up and down the country distressed me greatly. My own upbringing had been haphazard, but I’d always been loved.
Not all unwanted children lived in poor families. In well-to-do families, too, a child might become an ‘inconvenience’, due perhaps to remarriage, or being a girl when a boy was desired, or plain and awkward when pretty and charming was wanted. Or even, like Lucy, be the hapless orphaned baby with a quarter stake in the family firm, an object of fear and resentment.
The fate of these wealthy unloved children varied. They might be left alone with only servants to care for them; be bundled off to boarding schools, some of them with harsh regimes; or physically well cared for but emotionally neglected. ‘A half-finished piece of embroidery left on a chair’, was how young Lucy Roche had heartbreakingly described herself before her marriage. No wonder she clung to the man who had said he loved her!
I didn’t tell Ben about Lefebre’s visit, any more than I told him of Charles Roche’s suggestion I become companion to his sister Phoebe. I could well imagine his reaction to either piece of news.
Ben seemed content that I was living in Dorset Square again, for the time being, at any rate.
‘At least I know where you are,’ he said. ‘Let this be a warning to you, Lizzie!’
‘Very well! Don’t preach at me, Ben.’
‘I’m not preaching and I don’t want us to argue. But I do want you to be…’
‘Yes?’ I asked when he fell silent.
He shook his head. ‘In truth I don’t want you any other way than you are.’
This was straying into territory I wanted to avoid. I sought to change the direction of this conversation by saying, ‘I can’t help thinking of Andrew Beresford. What will he do? He would have looked after Lucy and made her happy, given half a chance.’
‘Given a chance, we’d all like to make the woman we love happy,’ said Ben simply.
‘Thank you,’ I said after a long silence. ‘But we always seem thrown together in such violent circumstances. How can we forget all these things and just concentrate on ourselves?’
‘Or how can you be married to an inspector of police who will come home to his dinner from a scene of indescribable wickedness and horror?’
‘Don’t!’ I said quickly. ‘I only need some time.’
‘Of course.’ After a moment he went on awkwardly: ‘We are still walking out, aren’t we, Lizzie?’
‘Yes, Ben,’ I told him. ‘We are still walking out.’
Although the inscription below is found on a gravestone in Oxfordshire, in Chipping Norton parish churchyard, and not in Hampshire, (and is one hundred years earlier than the date of Lizzie’s journey to the south coast), nevertheless it provided the spark from which this story grew.
Here
Lieth the Body of
PHILLIS wife of
JOHN HUMPHREYS
Rat Catcher
Who has lodged
In many a Town
And Traveled [sic] far and near
By Age and death
Shee [sic] is struck down
To her last lodging here
Who died June Yar [sic] 1763
Aged 58
Also by Ann Granger
LIZZIE MARTIN MYSTERIES
The Companion
FRAN VARADY CRIME NOVELS
Asking for Trouble
Keeping Bad Company
Running Scared
Risking It All
Watching Out
Mixing with Murder
Rattling the Bones
MITCHELL AND MARKBY CRIME NOVELS
Say It with Poison
A Season for Murder
Cold in the Earth
Murder Among Us
Where Old Bones Lie
A Fine Place for Death
Flowers for His Funeral
Candle for a Corpse
A Touch of Mortality
A Word After Dying
Call the Dead Again
Beneath These Stones
Shades of Murder
A Restless Evil
That Way Murder Lies
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A MORTAL CURIOSITY
. Copyright © 2008 by Ann Granger. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Granger, Ann.
A mortal curiosity / Ann Granger.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36352-9
ISBN-10: 0-312-36352-4
1. Teenage mothers—Fiction. 2. Maiden aunts—Fiction. 3. Rich people—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6057.R259 M67 2008
823'.914—dc22
2008011564
First published in Great Britain by Headline Publishing Group, an Hachette Livre UK Publishing Group
First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: August 2008
eISBN 9781466823884
First eBook edition: July 2012