Axel (2 page)

As could crying, pacing, and fretting. Swooning, though tempting, was out of the question.

“Yes, madam.” When Shreve returned with the brandy and the writing supplies, Abby sent him sniffing and blinking back to the kitchen. Shreve had been with her husband since the colonel had come home from India eleven years ago.

The butler, unlike the lady of the house, was entitled to faltering composure.

Abby turned her focus to writing an obituary, because the local weekly would expect it of her.

Then too, she needed to remain occupied, or she’d hear again the obscene report of a gun in her own home, at an hour when all should have been seeking their beds.

Her third draft of an opening sentence was disturbed by a single, brisk knock on the door, followed by Axel Belmont striding into the family parlor. His height and his sense of purpose made the room seem small, and if Abby had resented him before, he provoked her to positive distaste now.

She rose from the sofa and shrugged out of his coat. “I trust you left Ambers at his post?” she asked, holding the coat out to her guest.

Though tonight he was
the magistrate
, not a guest at all.

Mr. Belmont slipped into the coat with the ease of a man who managed often without a valet.

“I left Ambers in the study with Mrs. Pritchard. Shall we sit? We have matters to discuss, Mrs. Stoneleigh. Matters you will find troubling. I can delay this conversation until tomorrow, but the news will not improve with time.”

Gregory would be just as dead, in other words.

“My husband shot himself,” Abby said as evenly as she could. She put that blunt reality on offer, not because she wanted to spare Mr. Belmont’s delicate sensibilities, if any such sensibilities he possessed.

Abby spoke those terrible, bewildering words because she needed to yank the truth out of the shadows down the corridor, where it quite honestly frightened her.

“The colonel was in good health,” she went on. “He had much to live for, seemed in reasonably good spirits most of the time, and yet he took his own life. What could be more troubling than that?”

Your lack of reaction
, Axel wanted to retort, but when his own spouse had died, his control hadn’t slipped until he’d come upon his brother Matthew, holding a sobbing Dayton after the funeral.

“Let me tell you what I’ve observed so far,” Axel suggested. “Shall I pour?” A widower would expire of dehydration if he didn’t learn to navigate a tea service.

“I’ve had a cup. Shreve brought the brandy if you’d rather.”

“I would.” Tea at nearly midnight, at the scene of a crime, seemed insufficient fortification given what Axel had to tell her.

Mrs. Stoneleigh poured him a generous portion of brandy, the glow from the hearth creating fiery highlights in her dark hair. Her movements were elegant and graceful, and that was somehow wrong.

Was she surprised by her husband’s death? Relieved?
Pleased?

“First,” Axel said, after a bracing sip of good brandy, “my condolences on your loss.”

“My thanks.” Two words, and tersely offered. She took one side of a brocade love seat pulled close to the hearth. “Won’t you sit, Mr. Belmont? The hour is late, you have to be tired, and we must discuss awkward matters. I’d rather be able to see your face.”

Forthright, Axel thought, running a hand through his hair, which the winter wind had doubtless left in ungentlemanly disarray. Mrs. Stoneleigh had a way of expressing herself that made him feel as if he were trying her patience and insulting her intelligence.

All thorns and no blossom.

Axel could be blunt too. He lowered himself not into a wing chair, but to the place right beside her.

“I have reason to believe your husband was the victim of foul play.” Murder being the foulest form of human
play
imaginable. “To quiet misgivings from our vicar, I will preliminarily rule death by accident.”

Mrs. Stoneleigh was silent for a moment, not reacting at all.

Then she sat taller. “Sir, you will explain yourself. Please.”

“The cause of death was likely that gunshot to the chest—to the heart—as you no doubt suspected.” Contrary to what the Gothic novels propounded, once the heart ceased performing its function, little bleeding occurred—and Stoneleigh’s heart had stopped instantly.

“I did not move the body,” Mrs. Stoneleigh said, her hand going to her middle. “I knew he was dead, because I put my fingers to the side of his neck, and I saw blood spattered on the desk and blotter. I also saw the gun in his hand, but I did not… I did not
look
.”

“You were wise not to disturb the scene.” Was she reacting now? Was there a slight tension around her eyes and mouth? She was mortally pale, though many English women went to pains to protect their complexions.

“You needn’t flatter me, Mr. Belmont. I simply did not know what to do, other than to send for my nearest neighbor.”

Who had the bad luck to be serving as the temporary magistrate—something she apparently hadn’t known.

“Given the gun in your husband’s hand, a casual observer might think the colonel had, indeed, taken his own life, or perhaps had an accident while cleaning his equipment.”

Axel took another swallow of brandy, resisting the urge to down it all at once.

Mrs. Stoneleigh reached toward the tea service as if to pour herself a second cup, but her hand drifted to her lap instead.

“God help my late husband if, after more than twenty years in the cavalry, he was attempting to clean a loaded gun.”

“True.” Axel hadn’t considered that perspective. “The difficulty with the theory of suicide, though, is that the gun in your husband’s hand had not been fired and was, in fact, still loaded. Your husband was shot, and the fatal bullet was not fired at close range.”

Axel braced himself for a swoon, some ladylike weeping, even a fit of hysterics. People took their own lives. This was tragic, of course, but in Axel’s estimation, suicide was preferable to murder most foul two doors down the corridor.

“How can you tell how far away the bullet was fired?” Mrs. Stoneleigh’s voice was steady, her gaze on the fire equally steady, and her very composure ripped at Axel’s sensibilities. She’d been married to the man for, what, nearly a decade?

She might have been discussing the weather.

He topped up his brandy and gave her a brief explanation of the initial evidence.

“Powder burns,” she summarized. “You are saying the colonel’s clothes have no powder burns.”

“None to speak of, so the bullet must have been fired from some distance.”

“Is there more?” she asked, gaze still fixed on the flames.

“Not much.” Would a second brandy refill be rude—or stupid? “The dimensions of the wound suggest a small gun was used, and from across the room. Such weapons—pea shooters—are notoriously inaccurate. They lack the length of barrel to steady the projectile toward its target, and such a small weapon seldom fires with much force.”

“I’ve carried such guns, and you are correct. Their greatest value is in the noise they create, but somebody apparently had good aim.”

Would a woman guilty of murder make such an admission?
“Who heard the shot, Mrs. Stoneleigh?”

“I did. I was in my room, directly above the colonel’s study, where he usually finished his evenings with a nightcap. Shreve would have heard the shot, because he was in the corridor tending to the lamps, as was his habit as the hour approached eleven. Those servants still awake below stairs heard it, as did Ambers, who was outside the stable master’s quarters smoking. Ambers was the first to arrive at the colonel’s side. Shreve became occupied with… escorting me to the scene.”

If somebody on that list hadn’t killed the colonel, then a murderer as yet unknown had also heard the shot and taken off across the snowy grounds, all footprints conveniently obliterated by the brisk wind.

“The colonel never finished that nightcap,” Axel said. “I’ll want to talk to Ambers, and to Shreve, sooner rather than later, and to the rest of your staff.”

What Axel truly wanted was to return to the quiet and warmth of his glass house, there to work on grafts until his back ached and his vision blurred.

“Shreve is busy now,” Mrs. Stoneleigh said. “He should be available to speak with you mid-morning tomorrow.”

Axel was the magistrate, for pity’s sake, investigating the murder of her husband in her own home. She ought to want answers more than she wanted her next breath. “What can Shreve possibly have to keep him busy?”

The look in Mrs. Stoneleigh’s eyes was faintly pitying. Her expression was as close to warm as Axel had seen it, ever, then he realized the direction of her thoughts.

“When a spouse dies,” she said, gently, “there is much to be done. The windows must be hung with crepe, and the portraits and mirrors in the public rooms, as well. The liveried servants must acquire black armbands, the deceased must be laid out, the coffin built, the surviving family’s wardrobe must be dyed black, the hearse hired, the vicar notified, and so forth. You know this.”

Axel did know this, and he resented her bitterly for making him recall that he knew it. Resentment fueled by fatigue prompted his next observation.

“You’re coping with your husband’s demise well, Mrs. Stoneleigh.”

“Am I a suspect?” The pity, at least, was gone from her eyes.

“No.”
Not yet
. “But if murder was done in this house, while others were about, then we have both a crime and mystery on our hands.”

“And a tragedy,” she amended. “Have you more questions, Mr. Belmont, or shall I see you out?”

“I can see myself out,” Axel replied, unhappy with himself for his pique. “And again, my condolences.” He rose, surprised when she did as well, albeit slowly, and walked him to the door.

“You seem fatigued,” she said. “Unusually so, not merely like a man at the end of a long day.” Her observation wasn’t rude, but neither was it… flattering.

“I’ve arrived just this afternoon from my brother’s home in Sussex, hailed back to Oxfordshire by Rutland’s decision to nip off to Bath in the dead of winter. Phillip and Dayton chose to remain with their uncle until spring.”

Unfortunate word choice—
dead
of winter—which she was apparently too much of a lady to react to.

“You are orphaned, then. I am sorry to have disturbed you when you are much in need of rest. Shall I tell Shreve to expect you tomorrow morning?”

Axel spared a thought for his grafts and crosses.

“By eleven,” he replied, taking her hand and bowing over it. “Will you be all right?”

Now where had that come from, and why was her hand still so cold?

“I don’t know.” She seemed unaware of their joined hands, or at least unconcerned. “I’ve heard of people being shocked beyond the expression of appropriate sentiments, and I suspect I am in that situation. My husband is dead, and though we were not… entangled, as some spouses are, I did not foresee such an end to the day, to any of my days. The colonel was not ill, he was not reckless, he did not drink to excess…”

A minute shudder passed through her, one Axel detected only because he was holding her hand.

“I suppose,” she went on, “I will realize more fully what has befallen this house when Mrs. Pritchard and I lay out my… the body.”

“Mrs. Pritchard will charge you good coin for tending to that office, and she needs the money too. You are not to return to the study until the morning.” Axel made it an order, which was a blunder. The father of two adolescent boys learned that giving orders all but guaranteed his wishes would be disrespected.

Mrs. Stoneleigh withdrew her hand. “I want to argue with you, but only to argue for argument’s sake, not because I want to see my husband’s corpse, particularly, not with a bullet…”

Another little shiver, two…

“Mrs. Stoneleigh?” Axel drew her back over to the hearth, grabbing an afghan from the back of the love seat and draping it over her shoulders. “Have you somebody who can sit with you, get you up to bed?”

“I do not use a lady’s maid,” she said, much the same as she might have reported eschewing sugar in her tea. “The colonel regards it…
regarded it
… Well, no. I do not have a lady’s maid.”

Axel endured an inconvenient stab of compassion—one that temporarily obliterated the question of her role in her husband’s death. Abigail Stoneleigh was alone, more alone than a woman expected to be at the age of… twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? Her husband had died violently, and even if she’d killed him, who knew what her motivations might have been?

Time enough later to locate proper outrage if she’d done the old boy a fatal turn.

Axel took a moment to study her, the way he’d studied each and every specimen in his glass houses when he’d returned to Candlewick after weeks of absence. Mrs. Stoneleigh looked overwatered and undernourished, ready to drop leaves and wilt.

“I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“I’ll manage.” She was grimly certain on that point. “I’ve been managing alone for some time, Mr. Belmont. My thanks for your concern. Until tomorrow.”

Axel had no authority to gainsay her, so he bowed and took his leave. He was back on his horse—why on God’s good green earth had nobody devised a means of warming a saddle before a man sat his innocent, unsuspecting arse on chilled leather?—when he finally put a name to what he’d seen in Mrs. Stoneleigh’s luminous green eyes the last time he’d bowed over her hand.

Fear
. Mrs. Stoneleigh was afraid, but was she afraid of the murderer, or of having her part in the murder revealed?

A
small crowd stood about in the frozen churchyard after the service, most people keeping scarves wrapped about their faces. The snow muffled sound further, in addition to the quiet required by the solemnity of the occasion.

Because nobody seemed comfortable approaching the widow directly, Axel took it upon himself to escort Mrs. Stoneleigh back to the manor, a mile’s distance along a frozen, rutted lane. He let the other menfolk see to the graveside ritual, and the concomitant freezing of ears, nose, and toes.