Murder at Mullings--A 1930s country house murder mystery (2 page)

The consolation for this depressing information was being told to sit down before being handed a cup of the best tea Florie had ever tasted. At home in the cramped house twelve miles away, the amount of leaves that went into the pot could have been counted out, and when the situation demanded they were re-brewed until there was little or no colour or flavour left.

In the course of that first day at Mullings, Florie's hope that the stories she would one day be able to tell of her years in service began to dim around the edges. The spurt of interest aroused on hearing that Lord Stodmarsh had possessed a youthful enthusiasm for putting on theatricals in the gallery was quickly doused.

‘He long ago abandoned such ideas, which did rather worry his father, to concentrate devotedly on overseeing the estate, which includes Farn Deane, the home farm. Lord and Lady Stodmarsh used to attend the occasional play in London, but she's no longer fit for the journey.'

‘I'm sorry to hear it, Mrs Longbrow.'

‘No life's without its sorrows, as the vicar enjoys reminding us from the pulpit. Well, Florie, standing here feeling sorry for our good lady won't bring her improvement. There's the larder shelves still to be done and the vegetables peeled for Mrs McDonald.' Mrs McDonald, the cook, had never been married; the
Mrs
was a courtesy befitting her position in the household. Though immensely proud of her Scottish heritage, she'd not once been further north than Yorkshire.

‘I've already seen to both, Mrs Longbrow.'

‘Then you can help get the soup on.' This said, the housekeeper swept away to have a word with the head housemaid about turning the library carpet, something that was done every three months to even the wear.

The poor health that often kept Lady Stodmarsh confined to her bedroom turned out to be nothing more interesting than rheumatism – not a chronic violent hysteria that would have required her door being locked from the outside. The sons were red-haired, fair-skinned and blue-eyed. Boys of that description could, unfairly or not, never grow up to be unflinchingly heroic or fascinatingly ignoble. Red hair might even mean ginger. Undoubtedly there would be freckles. The death knell to dreams indeed!

And yet, for a girl prepared to make the best of things, there were indications of compensations at Mullings. Mrs Longbrow, though strict sounding, did not seem unkind; the butler looked a little like Florie's father. Mrs McDonald was red-faced without looking scarily fierce, and the lesser members of the staff (though all far above herself on the importance ladder) seemed willing to welcome Florie into their midst. During the evening meal, a feast of sausages, pork pie, bubble and squeak, and apple Charlotte, Lady Stodmarsh's lady's maid smiled at her. The bootboy winked.

By the end of the week Florie was included, somewhat hoveringly, in the other girls' giggling chatter in those rare free moments between scrubbing, polishing, sweeping, fetching and carrying. She missed her parents and younger brother and sister, but wasn't homesick. A fortnight later the bootboy had asked if she would go with him to the Dovecote Hatch Summer Fair. She wasn't put off by his impishly cocksure manner; she rather liked him for it, but she wasn't ready for holding hands, let alone kissing, so she encouraged him to take the other kitchen maid instead. She was sure it was Betty he really fancied, but was afraid she'd toss her head and tell him he had a nerve to think she'd be seen out with him. Betty was pretty enough to be pert. Florie wasn't, not even in her best dress with the collar daintily stitched from two lace-edged handkerchiefs given to her mother as a wedding present by the titled lady in Northumbria.

The looking glass didn't tell fibs. She was overly tall and reed-thin, with a pale, narrow face and hair that, though thick, could not have been described as anything other than mousy. And there was something else to cause diffidence. Her passionate love of reading made her different from many other young people of her class. A vivid imagination stirred by her mother's storytelling led to her grasping for any book she could lay her hands on, from penny dreadfuls to Jane Austen, Thackeray, the Brontës, and Dickens; and then there was poetry, especially Keats and Shelley. The elderly bookseller three streets away from her home had at first sold her badly worn copies for a penny and then begun giving them to her because he said her smiles brightened his week. Not something to be talked about if you didn't want to be thought above yourself. She had learned to guard against using big words or allowing her grammar to veer into something better than that spoken around her. She must be even more careful at Mullings. A kitchen maid seeming to give herself airs would have laid herself open to ridicule anywhere, devastatingly so in the world below stairs. Far better to be viewed as awkwardly shy.

Fortunately she was kept too busy scurrying to complete two or three tasks at once to worry about much else. By the time she crawled into bed in the box-like room she shared with Betty she was tired out, but never unhappy. She knew she was giving satisfaction, especially to Mrs McDonald, whom she'd once overheard saying to Mrs Longbrow, ‘That Florie has a quick mind in addition to getting more out of five minutes than Betty ever could in an hour.'

Florie did not catch a glimpse of Lord Stodmarsh until a month after her arrival when she was about to leave by the woodland path at the rear of the house for her first day off. He was crossing a stretch of lawn with a golden Labrador at his side. She had learned that he was in his late thirties, but his burly build, grizzled hair, side whiskers and drooping moustache made him look almost elderly to her youthful eye. Seeing her, he raised his hat and inclined his head in her direction. It was a courtly gesture at odds with the less than patrician appearance. She was so surprised she almost tripped over her feet in fumbling a curtsy. This was something – small but still exciting – to tell her mother on reaching home.

In the coming years her opinion of Lord Stodmarsh as a kind and considerate man was confirmed, as was the case with Lady Stodmarsh in her gentle way. When Florie's father died unexpectedly, Mrs Longbrow told her that the master and mistress wished to see her in the drawing room to express their sympathy. She returned to the kitchen additionally heartened by permission to go home for a week without loss of wages. On every Christmas Day each member of the staff was presented with a gift, handkerchiefs or gloves, and on New Year's Eve the entire staff was invited into the hall for a celebratory cup of punch.

By the age of twenty-four Florie was head housemaid and had gained sufficient assurance of being liked and respected at Mullings to no longer feel the need to conceal the fact that much of her free time was spent reading. Indeed, on encountering Lord Stodmarsh outside Craddock's Antiquarian Bookshop one Saturday afternoon, she unhesitatingly responded to his enquiry as to what she had purchased by showing him the volume – a copy of
The Tempest.

‘Ah, yes!' his eyes revealed a wistful gleam. ‘When I was a very young man we performed that play at the house. I played Prospero. Wonder where my costume for that part and others went! I expect up to some trunk in the attics. We Stodmarshes have always been loath to throw away anything that might one day be put back to use, even a hundred years hence! Good day to you, Florie. I trust you find your mother well if you are about to go and visit her.' How could some members of the gentry regard him as a buffoon? He hesitated before adding, ‘I hear you and the younger Norris boy are courting. I consider you both fortunate.'

Florie knew herself to be so. The Norrises were the tenants of Farn Deane, the home farm. She had become acquainted with Mrs Norris, conversing pleasantly in the village street, before being invited to tea on a day off when she wasn't going home because her mother had gone to nurse a cousin who was ill. It was on that occasion that she met Robert, the older son – his brother Tom was off at market – and was immediately drawn to him. She liked his warm respect for his parents; saw he had a sense of humor that had at its core a keen intelligence. And there was something else. A fluttering of attraction that had her fearing she would flush when he looked at her. He wasn't handsome – his build was too lanky, his face long and bony – but she felt that he was a man she'd never tire of seeing come through the door.

Florie and Robert married within the year and such was her happiness that she felt little sadness at leaving Mullings. Besides, she could frequently walk over for a visit with the staff or have them over to visit. Tom was yet unmarried and shortly after Florie's settling in at Farn Deane her mother-in-law suffered a heart attack, which left her permanently fatigued and often breathless. It was a relief to her and her husband that Florie could take over the running of the house. As the years passed without her conceiving, Florie tried not to give up hope that she and Robert would be surprised, like other couples, by the eventual arrival of a baby. Otherwise their marriage had in every way fulfilled the promise of their courtship.

Then came the declaration of war against Germany in 1914. A dark cloud swamped the village at the thought of its young – and not so young – men donning uniforms and marching off to who knew what fate. The former bootboy at Mullings, now a tanner's assistant, was amongst the first group to go. Florie shared the general anguish, but had little dread for Robert or his brother Tom: surely farmers were too much needed at home to be called upon. She should have known her husband would writhe against what he perceived as an avoidance of duty. One sunny morning – she was always to remember the incongruity of the cloudless sky – he told her the decision he had reached. Tom could manage well enough without him and their father, although in his sixties, still relished getting up at five and going down to the barns and dairy before heading for the fields. There was no argument she could bring to this, and the depth of her love for him and her respect for his viewpoint made selfish pleas unthinkable.

She knew with a numbed certainty the day she saw him off in 1915 that she would never see him in this life again. She read the same anguished awareness in his mother's eyes and they clung together before reminding themselves it was wash day and humble duties must go on. A telegram brought the news of Robert's death three months later. Florie was yet another war widow; more fortunate than many in that she didn't have to worry about keeping a roof over her head or putting food into hungry little mouths. And yet she chafed to leave Farn Deane, to escape the aching emptiness of rooms he would never again enter. Unfortunately she was more needed than ever, especially when her mother-in-law died in 1919. Everything changed the following year, when Tom married Gracie, a farmer's daughter from Kingsbury Knox, who was more than capable taking over the household reins.

Florie was considering her future with an optimism she had not felt for a long time, when Mrs Longbrow, the housekeeper under whom she had worked at Mullings and who was now well into her seventies, came to see her. This was not an unusual occurrence – she quite often stopped by for a cup of tea and a chat – and Florie had retained her fond interest in life at Mullings. She had gone to the church to see Lionel marry and had grieved when he and his wife were killed in a motoring accident, the fault of the other driver, on returning home from a weekend in London. They left behind them a two-year-old son named Edward after his grandfather but called Ned. His presence, Mrs Longbrow had assured Florie on several occasions, had done a world of good in bringing solace to Lord Stodmarsh and his good lady. Mr William had also married. When those who had not seen his bride asked for a description of her, the most frequent response was, a fine figure of a woman – so often the more tactful way of saying
stout.
On the occasion of her latest visit to Farn Deane, Mrs Longbrow brought news on her own account.

‘It'll be a sad wrench, Florie, but the time has come for me to take life easier. I'm going to live with my widowed sister in Weymouth, and what I'm here to suggest is you take over from me at Mullings. You're the right age, close enough to what I was when I was taken on as housekeeper.'

Florie's teacup rattled as she set it down in its saucer. ‘It's very good of you to think of me.'

‘I did think of you,' the old lady's face crinkled into a smile, ‘but it was His Lordship that suggested it. He's always thought very highly of you. So don't go disappointing him or Lady Stodmarsh, who's none too well, as you'll have heard – crippled now with the rheumatism and so tired much of the time.'

‘Thank you, Mrs Longbrow – there's nothing I'd like better.'

‘Well, that's a relief! I'm sure it won't make difficulties that Mr Grumidge the butler and some other members of the staff are new since your day. You've got what it takes to get along without giving in, which, when it comes down to it, is what this job entails.'

And so Florie returned to Mullings at the age of thirty-five. In doing so, she felt that she had left Robert's grief-imprinted image behind at Farn Deane, allowing her to remember only the happiness. She received an especially warm and respectful welcome from Mrs McDonald the cook, who looked very little different from the old days, and was just as nimble on her feet despite her fifteen stone.

‘Nice, hard-working little Florie is how I thought of you when you first come here, Mrs Norris, if you'll forgive the remembering.'

Almost imperceptibly over the years she had become ‘Florence' to her family, with the exception of her cousin Hattie Fly in London, whom she did not see as often as she would have liked, but was in regular correspondence. In the eyes of the others, she had gone too far up in the world from her beginnings for ‘Florie' to be right or proper. She wished it weren't that way, but nothing she lovingly said or did had any effect, except to bring awkwardness to the situation. Even her mother rarely slipped back to the shortened version. Other than Hattie, there was only one person who still addressed her as Florie.