Page 31 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
It did, now that he mentioned it.
“Might she have dropped it?” I asked, looking around. “Before she lurched onto the lawn and fainted?”
“I suppose she might have done.”
“Should we look, then?” There was no part of me that wanted to go back onto the terrasse only to watch St George try to please his father by buttering up Lady Laetitia and her parents. I understood why he’d do it—Uncle Harold held the purse strings, as well as the title and all the power—but I still didn’t think I wanted to watch.
“No reason why not,” Christopher agreed, looking around. “She would have come up the driveway, I assume, the same way we are. And she came through the bushes… over there, was it?”
He indicated a break in the foliage up ahead. We could just hear the buzz of discourse on the terrasse from where we were standing. Not clearly enough to make out individual voices, but the general rise and fall of conversation.
I nodded. “Looks like.”
“Let’s look about, then. She would have traveled light, I assume, so probably not a trunk or weekender bag…”
No, Abigail had had the baby to carry. She would have been traveling quite light, I thought. No weight that she didn’t need, since she had a fifteen pound baby on her hip and wouldn’t want to carry anything else unless absolutely essential.
“Over there?” Constance ventured hesitantly. “Under the bush?”
She indicated a healthy specimen of lilac, seven feet tall, leafy green, but with no flowers left in the middle of July.
“Good eye,” Christopher commented. He started forward, and we both withdrew our hands from his arms to let him proceed. A moment later, he had pulled a cheap cloth tote from under the branches and extended it towards her. “Your discovery, my lady.”
Constance took it, but looked reluctant. “Do you think we should go through someone else’s personal belongings?”
“Aunt Roz will need nappies for the baby,” I pointed out. “It’s long enough since Christopher was small that I’m sure she doesn’t have any sitting around. And if there’s anything in there that’ll give us an idea of what’s going on, I think we owe it to ourselves to find out. Don’t you?”
She hesitated.
“It could exonerate Francis. She might have something in there that proves, without a doubt, that he isn’t responsible.”
Of course, there could be something that proved, without a doubt, that he was responsible, as well. But Constance didn’t seem to think about that. Her lips firmed. “Here? Or should we take it somewhere?”
I glanced around. The door to the boot room was nearby, but so was the carriage house, and aside from Wilkins’s presence, it might be more private. “In there.”
Christopher shot me a look. “Why are we hiding, Pippa? We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Just humor me,” I told him, as I headed for the row of cars again. “I don’t want everyone to see. Not until we know what we’re looking at. Although you’re right, there’s no reason to hide. Let’s just stop beside one of the cars and use the seat to lay out what we find.”
Christopher shrugged, but acquiesced. When we got there, he was the one who opened the door to Crispin’s blue H6 and gestured Constance forward. She placed the tote on the seat and bit her lip.
“Would you like me to do it?” I asked.
She slanted me a look. “Would you? It’s really more your place than mine.”
I wasn’t sure it was anyone’s place, but I also wasn’t about to let the opportunity go by to see what Abigail was carrying. Call it healthy curiosity, although I have been told, more than once, that I have a tendency to stick my nose into things where it has no business being.
Nonetheless, I turned the tote upside down and shook it. A shower of small items dropped and fluttered out and hit the seat, and a few bounced off.
“Coin purse,” Christopher said, as he fetched it from the floor of the Hispano-Suiza. “Ticket stub. Third class fare from London to Salisbury.”
I nodded, as I sorted through the things on the seat. “Nappies. A change of clothes for the baby. A blanket.”
It had ‘Elizabeth Anne 1-14-1926’ embroidered in one corner, surrounded by small, blue flowers. I squinted. “Violets?”
“Looks more like forget-me-nots,” Christopher said, not that he knows much more about flowers than I do. “Pretty, whatever they are.”
It was. A christening-gift, perhaps, or something for when the baby had been born. It was clearly not off the rack, but something a friend or relative—or Abigail herself—had made, perhaps while she’d been waiting for little Bess to be born.
