Band of Sisters (45 page)

That evening, over an elaborately planned banquet, Belgadt announced, “With our mutual investments, gentlemen, we can more than double our playing fields. Morrow has agreed to match us dollar for dollar and inventory for inventory, the proceeds to be divided by all.”

Murmurs of surprise and approbation ran both sides of the banquet table.

“All that you see, gentlemen—” Belgadt spread his hands before the lavish feast and wider, to include the estate—“is but the beginning for all of us.”

Glasses were raised.

The first course had just been served when the lights flickered from the storm. Belgadt motioned to Harder, who nodded to Joshua. The two butlers produced candelabras for the sideboards and along the banquet table. Before they had set them all in place, the electric lights went out.

Once accustomed to the change in lighting, Belgadt initiated toasts. Half jests, vulgar boasts, and running speculations regarding the extent of financial possibilities and the necessity for personally “testing new merchandise” peppered the second and third course.

It wasn’t until the fourth course was removed that the stomach cramping began—a grimace here, a puffing of the cheeks there. After the second man excused himself from the table, Belgadt received wary glances from his remaining guests.

The fifth man to clutch his stomach exclaimed, “What is this, Belgadt? You trying to poison us?”

Belgadt smiled and huffed at the insult but was taken aback by Curtis’s furious and accusing glance as he clasped his napkin to his mouth, excused himself quickly, and motioned for Joshua to follow.

When retching was heard from the hallway, Belgadt called Harder to his side and ordered that the remaining Sedgebrook staff abandon their duties and attend their guests.

The order was barely given when Belgadt clutched his stomach and stumbled from the table.

Washbowls and seldom-used chamber pots, sloshing and stinking with the leavings of heaving guests, flew up and down the dark stairs between the arms of a frazzled staff. Indoor toilets, flushed too many at a time, backed up into bathrooms.

“Can you give me a hand, Carmichael?” Harder called from the upstairs landing, a chamber pot in either hand.

“When I’ve attended Mr. Morrow,” Joshua called back. “You’d best bring in a doctor, lest your employer boast a houseful of corpses!”

A door flew open at that, and a guest, stripped to the waist and clutching a towel before his mouth, ordered, “Tell Belgadt he’d best get a dozen doctors out here at once! Tell him I’ll sue for this!”

“Make the call, Harder,” Belgadt ordered weakly as he topped the stairs, his face ashen, just before his stomach emptied upon the landing.

Harder slammed his lamp onto the marble-topped table in the downstairs hallway and madly tapped the telephone’s cradle. “Operator . . . Operator!” He swore, then tried again.

“Is someone coming?” Joshua demanded from behind him, not sorry that the contents of the bowl he carried slopped onto Harder’s livery and shoe.

“The lines are down!” Harder raked his hands through his hair, not seeming to notice that he reeked. “Do the best you can. I’ll get the groom and send him for a doctor.”

“I just saw him below stairs. He’s down with it too—must have sampled the feast. Where’s the rest of your staff, man? We can’t manage alone!” Joshua challenged, barely able to hide his glee.

Harder looked desperately from Joshua to the front door and back.

“I’ll have to go for the doctor myself. I’ll bring the women to help you.” He swore beneath his breath. “At least the swells’ll die smiling.”

Maureen had searched Belgadt’s room during the first course. Finding no ledgers, no safe, no secret panels, and no women, she’d visited two of the guest bedchambers during toasts and Harder’s room after cutting the trunk and telephone wires coming in through the attic.

As the men took to their rooms, groaning and swearing, she waited silently in the small storage room beneath the stairs, the door barely cracked to let her observe the comings and goings of all who passed through the open hallway.

She never moved until Harder had thrown the telephone receiver against its cradle and, taking up his lamp, pushed open his employer’s study door. She shadowed Harder, just out of the lamp’s range, and crouched behind an overstuffed leather chair, watching him fumble before the fireplace. Awkwardly, he turned the right andiron. A single bookcase slid smoothly open behind another. Harder passed through, turned, and raised his hand somewhere beyond Maureen’s line of vision. Less than a moment passed before the bookcase slid back into place.

Holding her breath and a flashlight, Maureen searched the bookcase for a seam, a sign of the hidden door. There was none.

Having no idea how long before Harder might reappear or if she’d have warning, Maureen searched the drawers of Belgadt’s desk. The very fact that not one drawer was locked convinced her that she’d find nothing incriminating. But she paid special attention to the dimensions and depth of each drawer, in search of secret compartments, as Curtis had instructed her. She ran her hands along the backs, seats, and bottoms of his chairs, along the chair rail that ran round the room. She was halfway through reading the spines of his books upon the shelves when she heard the shuffling of feet beyond the bookcase. As the bookcase opened, Maureen clicked off her flashlight and slid beneath the desk.

“Arsenic, if I don’t miss my guess,” a weary Dr. Bates diagnosed, closing his bag in Belgadt’s drawing room before dawn. “Not enough to kill you, but certainly enough to make the lot of you deathly ill.”

“Thank heaven it wasn’t my oysters after all!” Mrs. Beaton nearly cried. “I was so afraid they might have turned.”

The doctor peered at her over his spectacles.

“But of course—” she colored suddenly—“I couldn’t see how. They looked fine, smelled fine, felt fine. It’s just . . . it was during dinner they all took so violently ill.”

“Did you taste the stew?” Dr. Bates demanded.

“Right before I dished it up.”

“And you suffered no ill effects?”

“Not one.”

“Your staff—any of them taste the stuff?”

“Just the groom. I saved him out a bowl, for when he come in from the cold. He did come down a bit, but he’d been nursing a cold anyway. Of course it mightn’t have been the same as Mr. Belgadt’s gentlemen.” She twisted the hem of her apron, the lie on her face.

“What about the wine?” He looked up and down the row of assembled staff.

“No.” She drew herself up. “I don’t allow nips of this and nips of that in my kitchen.”

“Of course not.” Dr. Bates smirked. “Who . . . ?”

“Harder and I served the dinner, sir,” Joshua spoke up. “But I assure you, nothin’ was amiss. We performed our duties in the dinin’ room.”

“For all to see?” the doctor baited.

“Yes, sir. As always, sir.”

“You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir. My sister Mary—” he tipped his head toward Maureen—“and I attend Mr. Morrow, his personal staff.”

“I see. And did you carry the stew from the kitchen to the dining room?”

“No, sir,” Joshua said but glanced at the floor as if reticent to speak.

“Why, Harder did, sir, and he chose the wine,” Mrs. Beaton said with a fleeting widening of her eyes.

“Tea and toast, that’s all the dandies want for breakfast,” Mrs. Beaton huffed to the minimal staff eating porridge in her kitchen. “And not all of them trust that, as if poison is everyday fare on our menu!”

“What do you think they’ll do to Harder?” Nancy whispered, ladling hot water into teapots. “I heard they’ll be taking him with them when they go.”

Mrs. Beaton shook her head. “It’ll be the end of him, I’m afraid. Men like those don’t take kindly to being dealt such a blow.”

“But why would Harder do such a thing?” Nancy pleaded.

“God only knows.” Mrs. Beaton momentarily closed her eyes.

“It’s insanity, sure enough!” Maureen vowed, setting cups on the trays. Joshua bumped her foot. She bit her smile.

“I heard they found a pouch of diamonds in the linin’ of his coat.” The groomsman imparted his knowledge with self-importance.

“They never!” Mrs. Beaton gasped.

“I always knew he was a fool,” the groomsman gloated. “Always parading around, above himself.”

“A distraction!” Nancy’s eyes lit with the knowledge. “He wanted a distraction so he could steal the diamonds!”

“A case for hanging!” the groomsman pronounced.

“Well—” Mrs. Beaton pushed herself up from the table, weariness evident in every movement—“they’ll all be gone before noon. But keeping their lordships waiting won’t improve their tempers. Get these trays upstairs, the both of you!”

“I’ll give you ladies a hand,” Joshua offered, tossing his napkin to the table.

Maureen shot Joshua a more than grateful glance before she realized that its warmth might not be construed as sisterly.