Page 56 of Evidence of Evil
A wary look entered his eyes. “If you must.”
“I really think I must. When you were courting Frances five years ago—”
“Thinkingof courting Frances,” he corrected her.
“I beg your pardon. Whatever your thoughts, I need to ask you exactly how intimate you were with her at that time.”
Color stained his cheeks. He tried to look haughty, but it was anger that chiefly showed. “Physically? You are asking if I took my neighbor’s gently born, unmarried daughter to bed?”
“Or anywhere else,” Constance said brazenly. “Were you physically intimate with her?”
“I most assuredly was not!” he exploded. “I am horrified that you need to ask. You may not think much of me, Mrs. Grey, but I am a man of honor, and had I overstepped the bounds of propriety in any way with Miss Niall, I should not have let her go to India but married her immediately. It would have been a terrible marriage, for both of us, but right is right!”
Constance sat back in her chair, metaphorically mopping her brow.Thank God. “I hoped you would say that. I apologize for asking. I’m afraid I have to further ignore good taste and ask if you ever heard rumors, either before or after the family went to India, about indiscretions on Miss Niall’s part?”
“None,” he said frigidly.
“Truly?”
He blinked. “I do not listen to gossip, Mrs. Grey. I advise you not to either.”
“Often, it is the only way to learn anything. Take heart, Sir Humphrey—I rarely pass it on. Do you have any idea what the police are looking into?”
“Everything and nothing,” he said, his scowl deepening. “They seem to have left off persecuting Elizabeth and are now annoying the villagers about anything and everything.”
“Ah. That might explain an odd encounter I had with Mrs. Phelps this afternoon. She seemed to think the villagers were accusingher.”
“It’s always the way of it. In a crisis, a woman alone is an easy target. One of the viler aspects of human nature.”
“But a perceptive one,” Constance said, covering her surprise.
“To be honest, I think the police investigation is doomed. There is nothing to show how poor Frances died, or even if anyone is to blame. I suspect we will never know the truth.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It bothers me that people might still look askance at Elizabeth. Even decent people like Colonel Niall.”
“Whydoeshe believe so fervently in Elizabeth’s guilt? No one else seems to.”
He was silent for a moment, sipping his port. “I suspect…because Frances did not like her. He feels he is his daughter’s sole defender because, I suspect, by the time of her death,despite all her advantages of beauty and charm, no one else loved her. And that is sad.”
In fact, it was so sad, it made Constance want to cry.
She swallowed hard. “Did you notice a difference in her after her return from India?”
“What sort of difference?”
“Anything, really. I suppose she was a little older, a little wiser. Was she calmer? More unhappy? Less flirtatious or lively?”
“Yes, I think shewasoutwardly calmer. I suppose she had grown up. Certainly, she was a little more circumspect in her behavior, but then, she was beyond the age when flirtatiousness can be put down to innocence. I thought she had grown kinder…until she said what she did about Elizabeth.”
“You don’t believe her,” Constance said carefully. “And yet I think things are not quite right between you and Elizabeth.”
He smiled with more than a hint of bitterness. “Ironic, is it not? That in death she finally comes between us.”
“Only if you let her,” Constance said, and smiled brightly toward the door as she heard Elizabeth’s footsteps approaching across the hall.
*
