Page 19 of The Curse of Penryth Hall
Mrs. Penrose started to speak but then thought better of it. She frowned into her empty cup before setting it on the gilded tea tray.
“You don’t think she had something to do with it, do you?”
Mrs. Penrose ran a hand over her hair, smoothing it nervously, and shook her head. “Of course not. But I wouldn’t blame her if she had, the way he treated her. Poor lamb. It doesn’t matter now, does it? Our Mr. Kivell will rid us of the curse for once and all.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose trying—and failing—to look as if she hadn’t told me that Ruan Kivell was more or less some type of arcane Cornish exorcist. “I suppose I don’t understand precisely. Whatisa Pellar, Mrs. Penrose? The way you speak of him he sounds like a cross between a physician, a witch, and a priest.”
She let out a startled laugh. “I suppose it’d seem that way to you, wouldn’t it, maid? Though come to think of it, perhaps it isn’t so different.”
“You think he can do what that White Witch did before, then?”
“Oh, maid. You don’t have any idea, do you?” She didn’t wait for me to respond before continuing on. “He’s the seventh son of a seventh son, from a family of charmers, he is. They say his mother’s line is descended from the very first Pellar. I knew he had the gift. Knew it the moment the lad was born. The magic’s in his very blood and bone.”
“Is that so?”
She nodded, her eyes taking on a fanatical light. “Oh, yes. He never was sick. Never a day in his life. Nor any of his kin. Ask me, Miss Vaughn, how many we lost in Lothlel Green to the influenza?”
The word made my skin crawl. It was still too recent, Ididn’t much want to think on it for fear the plague would consider it an invitation to return. “A handful?”
“Not. A. One.” She flashed me the most beatific smile I’d ever seen. The woman was beyond foxed, but I daresay she’d earned it after this morning. “And it’s all because of him. When he was still away in France, we lost dozens of young, strong lads to it. The mine even had to shut down because there was no one to work it. But he returned home from the war and instantly the illness fled. Tell me how else you can explain it.”
I couldn’t. But then again, the extent of my medical training covered battlefield triage, hasty tourniquets, and administering morphine to dying men. There was a plausible explanation for all of it. There had to be. “That’s all fascinating, but Sir Edward was murdered, Mrs. Penrose. I don’t see what a Pellar can do that a constable cannot.”
The woman’s eyes widened as if I’d struck her, and I immediately regretted my words. “Have you not listened to a word I said? It’s no man that we’re after. It’s Old Nick. And Ruan Kivell is the only thing standing between the mistress and the grave. Mark my words.” Her eyes drifted up to the ceiling, to the floor where Tamsyn was hopefully now resting peacefully. “And he’s coming for her, make no mistake on that. Her and that poor lamb of hers, just as it happened before.”
I cleared my throat and downed the rest of my cup. I’d encouraged her far too much on that score. Tamsyn was already convinced of this nonsense, and I needed to nip the conversation where it stood. “I’ve come to understand that Sir Edward wasn’t a…” I bit my lip, weighing the words. “A saint.”
The old woman snorted back a laugh. “Far from it. He was a menace.”
“Well, it’s on that point I want to know a bit more.”
Mrs. Penrose’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“You see, I want to help Tamsyn—” I caught myself. “Butthere are some things women don’t tell one another. Things that—” I glanced up through my lashes, as subtle as a bull dancing in the Trocadero.
“I shouldn’ta said what I did.” Her brow furrowed. “It’s not right to speak ill of the dead, but the things he did to the mistress weren’t right.”
I leaned forward, sensing my moment, and took her hands in mine. They were slightly damp. Cool. “Mrs. Penrose, was Edward unfaithful to her?”
She didn’t answer, but the acknowledgment was written all over her face. Ah, so Tamsyn too had Mrs. Penrose’s sympathies. I could work with this. “If there’s anything at all that he might have been involved in. Perhaps it’d help Mr. Kivell in his investigations. Was there anyone who would want to harm him? Wish him ill?”
“Wish him harm? Why, Nellie Smythe wished him dead on the village green not three weeks past. But this is more than the evil eye.”
The maids’ Miss Smythe. I leaned closer to the housekeeper. “And no one thought to bring it up?” This was absurd. A completely reasonable, rational explanation was at hand and everyone was leaping to the most far-fetched conclusions. And a woman at that! Anyone who had spent even a modicum of time existing in humanity would know that one didn’t need a dramatic conspiracy to explain away murder. The usual suspect was almost always the correct one. Jilted lovers. Money. Betrayal.
Mrs. Penrose shook her head and waved me off. “I see the look on your face, maid. But our Nellie is a good girl. She wouldn’t have done something like that. Her tongue got ahead of her, that’s all, and who would blame her? To be frank—”
As if she wasn’t already.
Mrs. Penrose laughed again, the gin having done its job.
“Miss Vaughn, to be perfectly frank with you, there isn’t a woman in Cornwall who wouldn’t wish Edward Chenowyth to the devil. But I doubt a one would have bothered to lay a finger on him. Least of all our Nellie.”
But a woman had. I’d seen her, dressed all in white going out into the orchard the very night he died. Though perhaps it hadn’t been a woman at all. From the distance, it could have been anyone. Anything.
Even you.The thought sickened me. I’d been known to sleepwalk as a child, even to leave the house. Once when I was a girl, my mother found me at the edge of the pond, sitting there staring sightlessly into the water. But to kill a man in one’s sleep? Was such a thing possible?
“Is everything all right, Miss Vaughn?”
