Page 22 of Evil at the Essex House
“Both,” Tom said. “Second time in a month, too.”
“What were you doing in Bristol a month ago?”
“Dropping off Baby Bess with the Doles,” Tom said.
Baby Bess—or Elizabeth Anne—was a roughly six-month-old baby girl we had thought might belong to Crispin, or if not, perhaps to Francis. She hadn’t turned out to belong to either of them, and when her mother died, Tom had driven the baby to her grandparents in Bristol. I hadn’t inquired into the specifics at the time. I’d honestly just been relieved to know that none of my nearest and dearest was responsible for the baby, or for her mother’s demise.
“Is something wrong?” I asked now.
Aunt Roz had impressed upon Tom that if Baby Bess wasn’t going to be happy with the Doles, or if the Doles weren’t nice people who would take good care of the tyke, Tom was to bring her back to Beckwith Place post haste, and Aunt Roz would flout convention and take her in herself, be damned to anyone’s prurient thoughts on the subject.
“Not with the baby,” Tom said. “Or I assume not. That wasn’t part of this.”
“What was?”
He exchanged a glance with Christopher, who lifted a shoulder. Tom turned back to me. “I got a summons from the Bristol police. One of their dead was in possession of one of my calling cards and they wanted to know why.”
“One of their?—?”
“Dead,” Tom nodded. “A woman was killed in an alley in Bristol three nights ago, and my card was in her reticule. The Bristol police wanted to know why.”
“Why would someone kill someone in an alley and leave her reticule? Was she—?” I stopped and swallowed.
“No,” Tom said, his own voice tight. “She was not harmed in any way.”
“Other than being dead?”
He nodded. “And you’re right, it’s strange that someone would have accosted her in an alley and then left her purse with her money behind. Usually when people are accosted in alleys, it’s for their money.”
Precisely. “So who was she? Why did she have your card?”
And then something occurred, and I added, my face pale, “Oh, God. It wasn’t Abigail Dole’s mother, was it? Her father has certainly been through enough.”
“Undoubtedly,” Tom nodded, while Christopher winced, “but no, it wasn’t her. It was Margaret Hughes.”
“Margaret who?”
“Aunt Charlotte’s lady’s maid,” Christopher said. “Remember? She went with Tom and the baby last month.”
Of course. After Aunt Charlotte’s death, Uncle Harold had sacked her maid, or perhaps it was that Hughes had decided to leave on her own when there was no work for her to do. Neither Uncle Harold nor Crispin were in need of a lady’s maid.
However it had come about, she had ended up at Beckwith Place the same weekend as Abigail Dole and her baby. There, she had proceeded to blackmail my Uncle Herbert for a thousand pounds, before going off with Tom and little Bess and a hefty cheque. I found it difficult to muster up much sorrow that she had come to a bad end.
“What about the money?” I asked.
“The money?”
“The thousand pounds from Uncle Herbert. We talked about this.”
“Wedidn’t talk about this,” Christopher said, looking from me to Tom and back.
It was my turn to wince. “You had just found out that you had a half-brother and then he was dead. It didn’t seem necessary to tell you that Hughes had blackmailed your father with that information.”
Not to mention with the information that not only had Uncle Herbert sired a son with one of the maids before he had married Aunt Roz, but apparently he’d done it again at some later point, after Francis and my late cousin Robbie had been born, and while Christopher was either a gleam in his mother’s eye, or perhaps not yet conceived.
He scowled. “What’s the big idea, not telling me something like that?”
“You seemed upset enough when we found you outside the study window,” I said, “and then there was the whole business with the gunshot. I suppose it slipped my mind for a while, and then I didn’t see the point in bringing it up. It doesn’t actually matter to anything. Except perhaps to her death.”
