Jerusalem Inn (27 page)

Her smile was chilly. “Go on, say it. Mistress. Might he have been concerned that Beatrice was going to tell
me?
” Her voice was taut.

“Blackmail?”

“Charles didn't know I knew.”

Jury let that go by. It was her first suspicion that was more interesting. “You were relieved at first that someone wasn't trying to kill
you.
Again, your husband?”

“No, of course not.” She said it too quickly.

“Mrs. Seaingham, when you found out about the murder of Beatrice Sleight, you assumed it might be you someone wanted to kill. No one else did, except police.” And Melrose Plant, but he didn't add that.

“Well — the cape . . . ”

Her tone wasn't convincing. “You turned out to be right. But I think your assumption was a little strange at the time. Why do you always wear white?”

She was taken aback by the question. “Why . . . I don't know; I suppose I never thought much about it.” She looked down at the coat.

“You shouldn't. It only increases the pallor; it accentuates how pale you are. You should wear colors. Pastels, something like that. It's obvious you don't want people to think you're ill. And you are ill, aren't you?”

Perfectly recovered and utterly cool, she said, “I'm dying, actually.”

“Of what?”

Only a small muscle twitched in her cheek as she shook her head, “I don't know. Neither does Sir George. He can't make it out. The tests show nothing.”

“You're lying, Grace. There haven't been any tests, have there? You won't let him make them.”

The porcelain skin did take on color at that as she gave him a long look. “If you already knew that —”

“It's because you're afraid it's your husband, isn't it? That's the way some poisons work. Small doses, just a bit at a time. Arsenic. Aconite could, except you'd have known immediately something was wrong. There's numbness, tingling —”

“Don't be stupid! How can you imagine —” The voice was strained.

Jury put his hand beneath her arm. “What you've been thinking about Charles isn't true.”

She obviously did not know what to say to this and reverted to the subject of the saint on the wall. Jury thought she looked almost luminous against the dark background of stone, the ghost who never stops searching. “He didn't like women, you know, St. Cuthbert. That chapel I was in, the Galilee Chapel it's called, was built for women because he didn't want them approaching his shrine. He didn't like women at all.”

Jury smiled. “Nobody's perfect. Let's go outside.”

 • • • 

The princess had come down from entrapment in the tower to have a peek out of the front door at a world that she hoped was real. The coil of hair, silvery in the sunlight, had loosened and strands escaped, feathering her temples. In her cheeks, there was some real color, and her skin looked almost amber in the watery light trapped in the close, girded on three sides by the buildings used by Durham University.

With the defenses pretty well stripped away and even the mannerisms changed — she was chewing at a corner of her
mouth, taking off the pale lipstick she wore — she put Jury in mind of a pretty, nervous young girl. The long strap of her purse slung over her shoulder, her arms were tightly folded across her breast and she was telling Jury about her bouts with nausea, her refusal to eat more than would barely sustain life, her careful monitoring of whatever she drank. “Do you like old movies?”

“When I get a chance to watch.”

“Remember
Suspicion?
I've felt like Joan Fontaine — you know, when Cary Grant is walking up the steps with that glass of milk.” Her smile was genuine; the violence of her bout with tears coming out of the cathedral seeming to have rinsed her face of all traces of its old anxiety. “Weren't people afraid it really was him, the husband? But, of course, no one could
really
think they'd let Cary Grant be guilty. Because he was so charming; because he was Cary Grant.” Sadly, she looked at Jury. “My husband isn't Cary Grant.”

“No. But he's not trying to poison you.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“Simple. He loves you.”

Her look, for her, was almost coy. “Now, just how do you know that?”

“For one thing, he said as much. For another, he didn't love Beatrice Sleight. For yet another, there's the way he looks at you. And, absolute proof: I can't imagine a man like your husband, whose study must be absolutely holy to him, letting a painter in there and you in there to sit for a picture, unless it was terribly important to him.”

She looked at him with something like wonder, a vulnerable, youthful look, and then she laughed. “You're either a wonderful detective or an awful romantic.”

He smiled. “Oh, I'm both.” He took her arm. “Come on; let's have lunch.”

 • • • 

In a tiny, luncheon-jammed restaurant in the middle of old Durham they ate some marvelous food — mushrooms as drunk as lords in winy, cheese-crusted dish; a casserole whose main constituent was Old Peculier; Stilton and gooseberry tart. Jury made sure that Grace ate everything, and she didn't need much coaxing. While they ate, she told him about herself and Charles: how she had simply been hoping the “thing” with Bea was a sort of middle-aged-fling business — she laughed — old middle-age; how she had always wanted children, but it had never happened. “And yet, there was Reeni — Tommy's mother — who thought children were a bit of a bore.” She ate her cheese and tart and grew quiet for a moment. “I used to watch Tommy with her. He adored her; she was so beautiful, but no character, really. Neither Irene nor Richard had much of it, to tell the truth. They were fun, charming, rich, and —” She shrugged and changed the subject. “There's an old junk shop near here I like to root round in. It's where I found this” — she raised the pendant she always wore — “and later found out how much it was worth. The poor, old man had no idea: he sold it for a pound. It's worth a thousand.” She let the necklace fall. “I was wondering, could we go there for a few minutes?”

“Sure.” Jury paid the bill and they left, walking up the cobbled street toward her shop.

“I'm glad to hear you're not perfect, Grace.”

“Meaning?”

“The junk dealer. You took him for a thousand quid.” Jury laughed.

She stopped dead. “Really, Mr. Jury. I went back and gave him the money.”

“Oh, hell. And I was just beginning to think there was hope for you.”

She smiled broadly. “Meaning — I split the difference with him. I'm not perfect, after all.”

“You could have fooled me.”

They both laughed.

But as they entered the secondhand shop, Jury did not feel really happy at all. If her husband wasn't trying to poison Grace Seaingham, who was?

“W
HAT
do you think, Ruthven?” asked Melrose. His butler paused in the act of brushing Melrose's jacket and appeared to be contemplating a universal enigma.

“Had you noticed, sir, how Mr. Marchbanks decanted the claret last evening?”

The circumstances of last night might have provoked some other response, he thought, from anyone else. But given Ruthven's unyielding concern with the proprieties, Melrose supposed he oughtn't to be surprised. “Didn't let it breathe, or something?” Melrose was scrutinizing himself before a cheval mirror, a scrutiny that had nothing to do with vanity, but rather with seeking out signs of decay and premature death, and wondering, as he often did lately, if he couldn't trap some unwilling beauty into sharing Ardry End. He sighed, thinking of Polly Praed and her idiot letter.
(“Your Grace??”)
“I was thinking, Ruthven, more along the lines of what happened to Miss Beatrice Sleight,
not
about the butlerian maladroitness of Marchbanks.”

“Indeed, that is terrible, my lord. I barely slept a wink, thinking of it.” But the apologetic tone suggested the murder of Beatrice Sleight was merely an addendum to the awfulness of claret sediment.

Melrose picked a microscopic bit of lint from the jacket Ruthven had just brushed and put it on, wishing that his butler would stop that milord form of address. He had given up correcting Ruthven long ago: the Earl of Caverness once, the Earl of Carverness forever. It must really stick in Ruthven's throat that earls were one down from marquesses. Teenage marquesses, at that.

Ruthven, bringing up the polish on boots that had been polished once by the Seaingham's footman, sighed and murmured something about “poor Mrs. Seaingham.”

Surprised, Melrose turned from the mirror, unsuccessful in his attempt to plaster down the lick of hair that stood up on the crown of his head, yank it about as he might, and said, “What about Mrs. Seaingham?”

“These boots were not done proper, my lord.”

To Melrose they looked like burnished copper. Patiently, he repeated, “What
about
Mrs. Seaingham?”

“Why, she looks quite ill, sir. And perhaps you wouldn't notice how she scarcely touches her food. I've seen her plate come back, without hardly so much as a bite taken. Not too much of a surprise, of course, when you come to think on it. We, being used to Mrs. Ruthven's cooking —”

“Martha's. She's been cooking for the family all of my life. No need to stand on formalities.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. But what I wished to say was that, knowing
superior
cuisine, it is not at all surprising that Mrs. Seaingham might indeed lose a bit of appetite here. I mean,
really,
sir. The Cumberland sauce merely disguised a rather overcooked joint.” Ruthven's otherwise granite-still face came close to a smirk. “And the béarnaise —”

“My dear Ruthven. I really do not think that what has happened in Spinney Abbey should be put down to a choice of sauces.”

“No, my lord. You're quite right,” he said, his own line of thought undisturbed. “It's more the people, isn't it?”

“I should think so, Ruthven.” Melrose lit a pre-luncheon cigar and watched Ruthven place the boots on the floor, giving a sad little headshake over them, as if they too were destined for an early grave. “They'll never be the same, sir.”

“The boots? Or the guests? I take it you approve of neither?”

“It's not for me to comment, my lord. But it's clear that, well, some of them just won't do. I mean, sir, did you see Lady Assington with the Stilton?”

“Threw it on the floor, did she?”

Briefly, Ruthven shut his eyes, bearing up patiently under his young (forever young would Melrose be in Ruthven's eyes) lordship's making light of a serious matter. “She used a scoop, sir. I allow as how these jumped-up lower classes use them, but —”

“Surely, you're not calling the Seainghams ‘jumped-up,' and if they supply scoops — Ruthven,
why
are we talking about cheese scoops? Tell me something more to the point: what do their servants think of the Seainghams in general?”

Ruthven looked simply shocked.
“Really,
my lord. I would not lower myself to reporting the common gossip below stairs.”

In the distance a bell tinkled like a cow in the pasture. “Time for luncheon, Ruthven. Come on, give —” Melrose aborted a sneeze with his handkerchief.

“I do hope you've not caught a chill from being out last night. You have simply not conditioned yourself for winter sports, my lord.”

Ruthven was, if anything, a master of undersell. “I haven't conditioned myself for
any
sports. I am one of the idle rich.”

“That is not at all true. You have your professorial duties at University.”

“You must've heard something. You haven't been spending all of that time amongst the forks and knives and Branston pickle without hearing something.”

As Ruthven set to rebrushing Melrose's already perfectly brushed jacked, he said, “Only that the Seainghams had had several rows and that
he
wanted a divorce. Well, of course, Mrs. Seaingham, being High Church and all, wouldn't hear of it.” He paused, reflectively. “Did you notice Mr. MacQuade, sir? Last night at dinner, I mean?”

“Notice what? He does seem interested in Mrs. Seaingham, certainly.”

“Well, I wouldn't know about that. But he didn't
slide
the port, my lord. He lifted the bottle.”

And with that startling bit of news, Ruthven swanned out of the room.

M
ELROSE
found Susan Assington, in a dark green lawn dress, adrift in the library like a leaf fallen far from its branch, unused as she appeared to be to books: given the vague surprise she registered while turning pages, Gutenberg might only have come along yesterday.

“Looking for something to read, Lady Assington?”

He had taken her by surprise, that was certain, as she quickly stuffed the volume back into the bookcase. “It's just something on gardens.”

Hard to imagine her with a hoe in her hand, but Melrose went on, holding up
The Third Pigeon.
“I can definitely recommend Elizabeth Onions, if you like a sort of Scotland-bird-shooting mystery milieu —”

That was obviously no recommendation to her. “I hate
thrillers. Anyway, I don't see how you can make jokes about it. . . . . ” She was definitely on the verge of tears. “Proper mess, I call it.” Lady Assington's idiom seemed to have removed itself from Hampstead Heath to the stoops of Lambeth, reestablishing the shopgirl Susan as the real owners of both.

“Sorry. Guess I wasn't thinking. Would you like a cigarette?” Melrose extended his gold case, hoping she would sit down in one of the old leather chairs for a cozy conversation.

“I don't mind,” she said in a pouty way, and did sit down.