Dark Road to Darjeeling (16 page)

“It is generous of the Pennyfeathers to give you the time to come here,” I observed.

She waved a floury hand. “Memsa Pennyfeather is always busy with her cameras and the Reverend-Sahib has his books and his garden. So long as food appears, they do not care what I do.” That the Pennyfeathers did not closely supervise their staff should have won them disrespect, but there seemed to be a genuine fondness in Lalita when she spoke of her employers.

“Does Lady Eastley have you come often?”

She shrugged. “Once or twice each week.” She hesitated, then apparently in the mood for confidences, she pitched her
voice low and said, “I think she has a lover.” Her voice ended on a giggle, and I raised my brows.

“Indeed?” I felt my pulses quicken. This was the first glimmer of confirmation I had had for my own suspicions upon the point, and I considered the possible candidates. Harry Cavendish was the only eligible bachelor in the valley, although I supposed the doctor, as a widower, was technically marriageable. His present state left little to speak for him, I mused with a shudder, imagining poor Lucy tripping to his house with a basket of delicacies.

But I had not passed her on my way, and unless she knew of some other more discreet path, she did not have a rendezvous with the doctor.

Harry, however… I fixed a slight smile to my lips, tipping my head to invite confidences. “Is her lover handsome?” I asked her.

She giggled again, but said nothing.

“Will she be able to marry the gentleman?”

She darted a look around to make certain we were still alone in the tiny kitchen. “I think she means to. She will not do so yet, of course,” Lalita added piously. “Not until Miss Phipps is no more. Lady Eastley will not leave her beloved sister. But when she is gone, then will Lady Eastley follow her heart.”

“Is that why she keeps her lover secret? To hide it from Miss Phipps?”

Lalita nodded vehemently. “Yes, lady. She would not hurt her sister for all the world.”

That certainly sounded like Lucy. She was not overly burdened with intelligence and she was a romantic. It would appeal to her to conduct a clandestine relationship until she was free of the burden of Emma and could marry. It would never occur to her that Emma might be comforted by the knowledge that once she passed Lucy would be cared for, I thought with some exasperation.

I sipped the last of my
lassi
and dried my feet, resuming my boots
with a wince. We bade each other a friendly farewell, and I turned for the Peacocks, turning over all I had learned that morning.

Just as I reached the crossroads, I realised with a sigh that the leprous old granny was back again with her garrulous little companion.

“Hello, lady!” the boy called. I stopped and dropped a few more coins into the bowl that the gabbling old woman thrust into my path.

“There you are. I hope it helps you,” I told her. I made to move on, but she reached out a hand to grasp my skirt. I felt a wave of revulsion rise in my throat, but thanks to a merciful heaven, her hands were decently covered and I saw nothing of her disfigurements.

She said something to the little boy and he listened intently, then turned to me. “She says you walk a crooked path in a crooked wood, lady.”

I pursed my lips. “Right now I am trying to walk a very straight path home, thank you.”

The bundle of rags spoke again, the voice rising and falling in a singsong rhythm. The boy smiled as he listened to her.

“She says she likes that you wear blue today, lady. It is the colour of the Lord Shiva’s skin.”

The old woman’s voice dropped then, wheedling out a few bars of melody, a strange, warbling tune from these mountains, eerie and unlike anything I had ever heard.

“What is she singing?”

The boy shrugged. “It is a folk song of her own making. The words are these, ‘Black is white and white is black, raven is dove, and none shall go back.’” He smiled again, this time giving me a conspiratorial nod. “It is nonsense, lady. She blesses you for your charity,” he added with a nod toward the bowl.

I gave them both a polite nod of farewell and went on my
way, but for the rest of the afternoon the strange little tune played over and again in my head.

After a hearty luncheon, I repaired to my room to finish writing up my notes. I was extremely pleased with the morning’s business, and as I wrote, I pondered the question of how much to share with Brisbane. I was a little sorry for him that his enquiries in Calcutta had not borne fruit, but not sorry enough to show him the contents of my notebook. I felt at a distinct disadvantage in our race to unmask the killer, and I meant to keep every possible snippet of information that came my way.

Of course if he asked me directly, I should tell him, I reasoned smoothly. But since it would very likely not occur to him to ask me if Lucy Eastley had an excellent motive for murder or if Harry Cavendish himself might have easily killed his cousin in order to inherit the tea garden he meant to modernise, it was hardly my fault if I did not tell him. I could not be expected to remember everything, I decided.

I wrote up my notes, then left the notebook on the bedside table, stacked casually between a Brontë novel and a Baedeker’s guide to India. It was innocuous-looking enough that I doubted he would give it a second glance. On second thought, I knew Brisbane had read enough Poe to be familiar with the ruse of hiding things in plain sight, so I took up the book again, wrapped it in a nightdress and shoved it deeply under the mattress.

Buoyed by the morning’s work, I went to visit Jane. I had seen little of her since she had been forced to her bed, and I was happy to find her propped against a mountain of pillows, playing two-handed whist with Portia. A basket of sewing and a stack of novels crowded the bedside table at her elbow.

“Julia!” Jane exclaimed. “You are just in time. I am about to win another hand.”

Portia gave an inelegant snort. “Every hand for the past two days. I owe her seven thousand pounds,” she told me. “I do not know how, but she must be cheating.”

“Of course I am cheating,” Jane said calmly, “but you would never strike an expectant mother, so I intend to take full advantage of the situation.”

Portia pulled a face, and gathered up the cards. “I will go and see about some tea. Julia, mind you don’t let her fleece you as well. I may have to move in with you and Brisbane when we go back to London as it is.”

She left, giving me a significant look as she passed. “Proceed, but with a care,” she murmured. Jane and I settled in for a chat.

“It is so good to see you,” I told her. “I confess, when you left us, I was not certain we would ever see you again.”

She plucked at the coverlet, her cheeks flushing painfully. “I still regret it. I never meant to hurt anyone, least of all Portia. I was just so desperate.”

I picked up a baby garment from the top of the sewing basket and set a few stitches of my own. Uneven, but then the child would have something imperfect to know its Auntie Julia by.

“I thought you were happy with Portia,” I said.

“I was.” She paused, searching for the words. “When you and Brisbane decided to marry, was there no one who tried to make you feel bad about your choice?”

I snorted. “Half my family, and the rest simply looked on disapprovingly. The blood of old eccentricity may flow in our veins, my dear, but the Marches are shockingly regular when it comes to marriage. Brisbane is the first man whose reputation is besmirched by trade to marry into the family.”

“I cannot imagine Bellmont approved,” she said.

I wrinkled my nose at the mention of my eldest brother. A viscount, a prig, and a Tory member of Parliament, he was the most conventional of my siblings. He had wished me well and made the proper noises about my happiness, but he, along with most of my family, was deeply scandalised that I had married a man polluted by the exchange of money for services. Never mind that Brisbane had once handled an investigation that had earned him the gratitude of the highest in our land and himself was the descendant of dukes. To some members of my family, Brisbane would always stink of the shop.

“Yes, he tried to be supportive, bless him, but I could see him standing at the wedding, calculating what it would cost him in lost prestige to have a brother-in-law in trade. And Father, who if you will remember, actually counselled me to have an affair with Brisbane, was rather shocked when I consented to marry him. It all seems so terribly pointless and stupid. We are grown, the pair of us, we are independent of everyone else, we have no one’s happiness but our own to consider, and yet still folk will judge us—”

I broke off to find Jane regarding me with knowing eyes.

“Oh,” I said in a small voice.

“That is precisely how it was for us. But if next year, Brisbane earns the gratitude of the Prime Minister again and is ennobled for his pains, everyone will forget where he came from and what he is. All of that disapproval would simply melt like a spring snow. For Portia and for me, our liaison was easier to conceal should we wish, but it would never have met with the fullest approbation of society. When we fell in love, I did not care. I was romantic and young and Portia was—” She broke off, smiling, “Portia was the woman I wanted to be. Glamorous and kind and so exciting to be with. She made me feel like the sun shone only for me. And eventually I came to realise that I did not want to be her, I wanted only to never leave her side.”

She shifted a little and I rose to plump her cushions.

“I thought it would be enough, and it very nearly was,” she continued. “But then I began to notice babies. Everywhere. Your family in particular was overrun with them. The parks suddenly seemed thick with nannies and prams and those darling little babies. And then my sister had a child, and all I could think was that it would never happen for me. I would never know the most primeval of all pleasures for a woman, that of bearing a child of my own.”

She stroked absently at the sturdy round bundle of her belly. “And even though Portia was the whole world to me, she was no longer enough. I wanted, I
needed,
a child. Not a foundling, not some poor babe we took in to raise as our own. I wanted a child born of my body, something of my own blood and bone. Can you understand?”

Her eyes were fervent, and I smiled. “Of course. I’m not broody myself, but I know plenty of other women who are. I daresay I am unnatural,” I added lightly.

She returned the smile. “Not unnatural. Blessed. It was the most horrible craving I have ever known. I fell asleep each night, my pillow sodden with tears because I did not have a child of my own. And then I met Freddie again. He was so absurdly silly, so unexpectedly sweet. He confided in me about his own troubles, and suddenly it all made sense, how we could save each other.”

She faltered then, her eyes filling with tears.

“Jane,” I said, covering her hand with my own. My heart ached for her. “You need not speak of it, if you don’t wish to. I understand. Your loss is still so fresh, it must feel as if you have lost him all over again to tell me. There is no shame in grief, Jane.”

She covered her face with her hands, and I gathered her into
my arms. Her shoulders shook in my embrace. I smoothed her hair and murmured soft words of sympathy.

It was only after a long minute that I realised she was not weeping. She drew back, and wrapped her arms around her body, convulsing in hysterical laughter.

“Oh, Julia, I do not grieve for him, not now, not ever,” she told me, gasping for breath. She paused a moment and composed herself. “I am not sorry he is dead. The only emotion I felt when I buried him was relief. Do you understand now, Julia,
I am free.
”

At this confession, Jane fell into noisy sobs again, and I sighed, wondering if every conversation I was to have in India was destined to end in pronounced weeping.

She cried until she exhausted herself, falling into a deep sleep. She was curled like a child, or at least as curled as her heavily-pregnant body would permit, and her face settled into repose, sweetly innocent.

Deceptively innocent, I thought, remembering her last words. Hardly the statement of a fond widow, and dangerously close to a confession. I crept from the room then, and just as I pulled the door closed behind me, I almost collided with Portia.

“How is Jane? Does she need something?”

I grasped her by the elbow and towed her to my room where we could speak in private. When we gained the sanctuary of my bedchamber, Portia sat upon my bed, rubbing sulkily at her elbow.

“You have left a mark,” she said pointedly.

“I apologise, but I must speak with you. Do you know what Jane told me when we were alone? She hated Freddie Cavendish! She is glad he is dead.”

Portia blinked slowly. “Yes, I know.”

“You knew! You knew, and you hid this from me? How the devil am I supposed to aid in an investigation of the man’s murder if you conceal pertinent information?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said flatly. “It is not in the least pertinent that Jane despised him. He was monstrous to her.”

I strove for patience. “Portia, your loyalty to Jane does you credit, but I cannot believe it has escaped your notice that she has the best motive for wanting to murder him.”

“Really, Julia, you have the most suspicious mind! If Jane had killed him, she would hardly have appealed to us to help her, would she?”

“That is the first thing she would have done,” I said waspishly. “Any murderer, unless he is half-witted, would divert suspicion by requesting an investigation. And how much more clever to ask amateurs to do the work!”

“Amateurs and Brisbane,” she pointed out icily. “Your husband is one of the foremost private enquiry agents in England, if not the whole of Europe. Tell me, if you had committed a murder, would you want Brisbane hard upon your trail?”

She had a point, but I refused to concede it, and before I could develop a reply, she pressed her advantage. “Have you discovered anyone at all who could conceivably have a motive to murder Freddie?”

“Well, yes, but—”

Her eyes narrowed. “How many someones?”

I bit my lip, counting silently. The Cavendishes of course, then
Miss Thorne. And if Miss Thorne could have had a motive, it was just possible one could be imputed to her sister. And then there was the doctor. I nearly slapped my own brow. If Portia knew the doctor himself had confessed to killing Freddie, I should never hear the end of it.

“A few,” I temporised. “But Portia, I hardly see that any of their motives are as pressing as that of a wife who is desperate to be rid of her husband.”

“As yours when Edward Grey died?” she asked, her voice deadly calm.

“Badly done, Portia,” I told her, feeling something of the sisterly bond between us fray at the edges.

She must have read my emotion in my face, for she relented a little, but only a little. “I apologise. I know you would never have harmed Edward. I only meant that there must have been people who suspected you might have turned your hand to murder to be rid of him.”

That much was true. “Brisbane, actually,” I admitted.

“And yet he worked to prove otherwise, and so did you,” she said. “And you can do the same here. In fact, I must insist that you continue the investigation, so strong is my belief in her innocence.”

I said nothing, my arms folded over my chest. I was still smarting over her remark about Edward. She rose and came to me, and put her brow to mine.

“Oh, hen. You must help her. I love her so.” The fact that she called me hen was an indication of the depth of her feelings. It was a secret between the two of us that we had run away as children when our younger brother Valerius was born. Our mother had died in the effort, and Portia and I decided we did not wish to live at Bellmont Abbey without her. So we each of us packed up our most important treasures into a knotted hand
kerchief and went to live in the henhouse. We had decided upon the henhouse because we were forbidden to leave the estate, and the henhouse was small and cosy and we liked the chickens. Besides, we had a rather mercenary scheme to sell Father’s own eggs back to him and earn our keep with the poultry money. Of course, the scheme had failed when we realised precisely how vile the smell of a henhouse could be—to speak nothing of the hens themselves. I still bore a small scar upon my thumb from the beak of the boldest. But from time to time we still called one another hen when we meant to recall that time when we needed nothing and no one but each other.

I sighed. “Very well, hen. I will do what I can.”

My promise to Portia left me feeling rather low. I had liked Jane for a murderess. She was quiet and self-contained, and the proverb about still waters running deep was a true one, I thought. But I was instantly ashamed of myself. This was Jane, whom I had loved as a sister for many years, and my first thought, like Portia’s, should have been to establish her innocence, not to implicate her in the crime.

I said as much to Brisbane after we retired that evening. We had assembled a chessboard and played half a game, but my mind wandered and Brisbane finally surrendered and retrieved his pipe.

I always enjoyed the ritual of watching him light his pipe. It was an elaborate affair, purchased at great expense in Turkey, an antique from a pasha’s collection. Smoked last in a lush harem, now it puffed peacefully the fragrant clouds of the hashish that Brisbane occasionally smoked to allay the pains in his head. He offered me a draw upon the pipe, and after my second attempt, I waved him off.

But even that tiny amount of hashish had caused a lassitude
to steal over me, and I began to confide a little of my doubts to him. I related my conversations with Jane and Portia, reserving my intelligence from the doctor and Lalita and what I had discovered in my search of the estate office. I might have been relaxed, but I was not stupid. Brisbane had far more experience with hashish than I. No matter how indolent he became, not a detail of our conversation would escape him later.

“Are we wrong to exclude Jane simply because she is a friend?” I asked him, carefully couching my query to include him.

He took a long, slow inhalation of the pipe, drawing the sweet smoke into his lungs, puffing it out again after a minute of perfect stillness. “Yes.”

I put my tongue out at him. “That is hardly helpful. Elaborate please.”

Another moment of oblivion, then he put the pipe to the side to consider. “Have you never heard the fable of the scorpion and the frog?”

“No.”

“There once was a scorpion who came to the edge of a fast-flowing river.”

“You did not begin with ‘once upon a time,’” I interjected.

“That is for fairy tales,” he said with a look of faint reproof. “Now, there was a scorpion who came to the edge of a fast-flowing river. Seeing no way to cross it alone, he spied a frog and asked the frog to bear him across upon his back. The frog refused. ‘What if you should sting me?’ But the scorpion reassured him. ‘If I sting you, then we both shall drown.’ The frog could see the sense in this, and he permitted the scorpion to climb onto his back. They began to cross the river, and suddenly, when they were halfway across, the scorpion lashed with his tail and stung the frog. ‘You fool!’ cried the frog. ‘Now we will both
die. Why did you do that?’ And the scorpion said, ‘I could not help myself. It is simply in my nature.’”

I struggled to relate the tale to the topic at hand. “Surely you are not suggesting that it is in Jane’s nature to kill!”

He shrugged. “I am only saying it is not impossible. Every person has that place inside where the scales tip and murder suddenly becomes not just acceptable but necessary.”

“I do not,” I told him firmly.

“Really? You could not kill? Not even to protect a loved one?” His voice was soft, and I knew he was right. I would kill to protect him, and a dozen others besides if I included my family.

“But we are not speaking of such primitive motives as survival,” I pointed out. “Whoever killed Freddie Cavendish did so for monetary gain, to line his own pockets and live a comfortable life. I do think Jane would scruple at murder for such a reason.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps Freddie was not killed for money. You yourself just said the marriage was unhappy. What was she to do if she decided she wanted to be free of him? What options would a wife have in this remote and, if I may say it, godforsaken place?”

I pricked up my ears. “I thought you liked it here.”

He gave a little shudder. “There is not a decent tailor for two hundred miles. The scenery is spectacular, I grant you, but one can only look at a mountain for so long before one grasps all there is to know of it. It is large and cold, and I am ready to go home.”

It was not like Brisbane to be peevish, particularly after he had imbibed. “Home? You mean to England?”

He gave a bone-deep sigh of weariness. “Yes. I am tired of travelling. A man can only spend so much time abroad before
he longs for the comfort of his own hearth and the regularity of his own routine.”

I went to sit at his feet, putting my head upon his knee. “We will go tomorrow if it will make you happy.”

He stroked my hair absently. “We promised Portia. And Jane. They are family.”

I reached up and took his hand. “You are my family. Or so I promised in front of God and everyone else we know.”

“Bless you for that. But no, you think you mean it now, but you would never forgive yourself if we left now, and eventually you would never forgive me. We will stay until the business is finished.”

“And the moment we can, we will leave this place and board the first ship for England,” I promised him. “We will go to your rooms in Chapel Street and Mrs. Lawson can cook dainty meals for us and I will darn your socks and you will sit in front of the fire and tell me all about our latest investigations.”

He reached down and pulled me onto his lap. “Our latest investigations?”

I opened my mouth to explain, but he stopped it with a finger laid over my lips. “Never mind. You will never be the sort of wife to sit quietly at home whilst I am engaged at work. I do not know why I ever hoped you could.”

“I could still darn your socks,” I pointed out.

“Do you actually know how to darn socks?”

“No, but presumably I could learn. How difficult could it be? Morag does it.”

He looked searchingly into my eyes. “You were quite right. I want nothing more than to tuck you into a bandbox and leave you safely upon the shelf every time I leave.”

“I know. And it is a credit to you that occasionally you do not.”

A wry smile touched his lips. “How good of you to notice.”

“I notice many things, including how often you manage to distract me from the discussion at hand.”

He widened his eyes in mock innocence. “I would never do such a thing.”

“For instance,” I began, “we were discussing the likelihood that Jane murdered Freddie and you have managed to divert me entirely from the subject by means of proximity.”

I struggled to rise from his lap, but his arms held me fast. “Did I?” he murmured, pressing his mouth to the ticklish spot just behind my ear.

“Brisbane, I am quite serious. If you think you can always distract me from a discussion of the investigation by such feeble tricks.” I broke off, panting a little. “This is quite beneath you.”

“Quite,” he agreed, applying himself even more ardently to the demonstration of his affections.

By the time I had gathered my wits sufficiently to press the point, the lamps had guttered out and Brisbane was sleeping heavily, fatigued by his efforts—highly successful efforts, I must confess—to divert me from the investigation. I lay awake, physically satisfied but deeply annoyed. Even after nine months of marriage, I was still not entirely comfortable with my responses to his physical overtures. The merest touch from him and all reasonable thought seemed to fly out of my head. It was most disconcerting, and more so because he apparently knew it, I thought irritably.

I rose and went to the window, breathing in the heavily-scented night air. The moon hung low in the sky, full and round, shedding its pearly light over the landscape and silvering the leaves of the garden below. The air was still, and only the occasional cry from the nightingale disturbed the serenity of the scene.

Just then a flicker of movement flashed in the tail of my eye. It was a shadowy figure, moving noiselessly through the moonlit garden. It kept to the perimeter, and only by the rustling of the leaves was I able to follow its progress toward the gate. At the last moment, it stepped from the cover of the shrubberies and eased open the gate, disappearing soundlessly and closing the gate behind. The figure had been in the open ground only a moment, but long enough for me to see it was Harry Cavendish, sneaking from his home like a common thief.

I pondered Harry’s furtive actions for some time as sleep eluded me, and I decided to be pleased. If Harry was skulking from the Peacocks at odd hours of the night, it could only be for some nefarious purpose, and it did not take long for me to think of Lucy. Before Jane’s revelation, I had liked Lucy for the murder, and now the pendulum swung back to her. She and Harry, either in tandem or working alone but in the common interest of their relationship, might easily have killed Freddie. A secret affair, conducted by moonlight and tainted with murder, to be legalised after Emma died and Harry gained control of the tea garden. Lucy would be mistress of the vast plantation, and Harry would have her money to fund his improvements.

Of course, they might have made a match of it even without Harry’s inheritance, I reflected. They were both of them unattached, and Harry would not be the first to marry a woman with far more money. But that must have been the sticking point to the courtship, I thought suddenly with a rush of triumph. Harry was a proud man, not the sort to settle for being kept upon his wife’s coin. He would no more marry for money than Brisbane would have. Brisbane himself had proved immovable upon the point when he had no money of his own. Only a fortuitous development during our last investigation had given him sufficient
funds to take a rich wife upon his own terms. I could well imagine Harry baulking under the same circumstances, and it was a short step from there to the notion that Freddie’s death would solve all of his troubles, and therefore Lucy’s. A happy ending was possible for them, but only so long as their crimes went undiscovered, I mused. The difficulty was in determining which of them had committed the deed or if they worked in concert. I should have to be very clever indeed to discover the truth, and as I finally slid into sleep, I realised with some satisfaction that Brisbane was still favouring Jane for the villain. How surprised he would be when I bested him!