Page 80 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
What it didn’t explain, was that list of items we had found in her tote. Fair hair, blue eyes, black motorcar, grandson of the Duke of Sutherland.
Unless that wasn’t Abigail’s list, of course, but her mother’s. Uncle Herbert had been the grandson of the (previous) Duke of Sutherland at the time when Abigail would have been conceived, before the old man died and Henry succeeded to the title.
I had never been able to reconcile the idea that either Christopher, Crispin, or Francis had lied to me about Abigail. They’d all three sounded very sincere in their denial of her and her child, and this explained why.
What it didn’t explain, was who had killed her. But that really seemed like something of a side-issue at this point. I could reason that away as having been done by Laetitia, or in a pinch by Constance or Uncle Harold. Someone who wasn’t actually family and whom I would feel better about throwing to the wolves than my own flesh and blood.
No, this was all very much to the good, actually. Yes, my uncle was being blackmailed, and he had, apparently, been unfaithful to my aunt at some point before I’d been born. But while that was bad, nobody in the family appeared to be guilty of murder. I could relax.
And so I did, so much so that I actually staggered, and accidentally knocked into a walking stick that was leaning in the corner of the boot room. It fell over, clattering against the door, and that caused my uncle, who was still lingering in the hallway after seeing Hughes on her way, to appear in the doorway, as pale as a ghost and with terror in his eyes.
It was only slightly mollified by the sight of me. “Oh.” He sounded out of breath, although he had certainly not exerted himself on his way across the hallway, so it must be nerves. “It’s you, Pippa. What are you doing here?”
He glanced around the tiny boot room, probably to ascertain that I was alone.
“Just came in from outside,” I said brightly. “The vehicle from the morgue left with the body, and Christopher offered to take Doctor White to the village in the Bentley. I hope you don’t mind.”
I’m a reasonably good liar, if I do say so myself. I don’t think my voice gave anything away. It sounded perfectly normal and cheerful in my ears.
“No, no.” Uncle Harold waved it off as if it were nothing. Under normal circumstances, I would have expected at least a wince at the idea of letting his youngest son go off in the beloved automobile, but right now there was no reaction to that bit of news at all.
“Did you…” He eyed me, “Just now, did you say?”
I nodded.
“Through this door?”
“Of course. Where else would I—?”Oh.
“I locked it earlier,” Uncle Herbert said gently. “After I let Hughes in. I didn’t want people coming and going through all areas of the house, so I locked this door.”
Oops. I glanced at the key in the lock, and then back at Uncle Herbert. I’m sure guilt was writ all over my face in large letters.
“How much did you hear?” he wanted to know.
I winced. “Not all of it. Enough to know that you had an affair with one of the servants before you married Aunt Roz, and another with someone else before Christopher was born. And that there may have been children.”
“May have been?”
“I didn’t hear any proof,” I said.
Uncle Herbert nodded. “What do you plan to do with this knowledge, Pippa?”
I blinked. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, actually. “Is there something I should do with it?”
His lips curved hopefully. “I suppose it would be too much to ask you to keep it to yourself?”
“I’m not in the habit of keeping things from Christopher,” I said.
It wasn’t a threat. I wasn’t trying to be clever or calculated or whatever it might have sounded like. The words simply fell out of my mouth because they were true. I don’t keep things from Christopher. That’s not to say that I tell him everything. I don’t. But I’ve never held something like this back. Something that affects him as much as, if not more than, me.
“And we love you for it,” Uncle Herbert said sincerely. “You’ve been the best friend we could have asked for, for Christopher. All these years you’ve been like a sister to him, and to Francis.”
I nodded. We’d shared everything for twelve years, Christopher and I. The idea of keeping this secret from him made my stomach hurt.
However, so did telling him what his father had done.
“He doesn’t need to hear this, Pippa,” Uncle Herbert said, with something that hit in the neighborhood between anguish and persuasion in his voice. “It would only upset him, when there’s nothing he can do about it. It would upset them all.”
