Page 43 of Mischief at Marsden Manor
Or perhaps Cecily had simply been talking to herself. That would be the simplest explanation.
I felt pretty certain that it wouldn’t have been Constance, anyway. Of everyone here, she had the weakest motive for wanting Cecily out of the way. There was no possibility that Francis had got Cecily in the family way, and no way he would have killed her if he had. And if he hadn’t, then Constance had no motive, either.
“Is there a reason to think it wasn’t an accident?” Christopher wanted to know. “I know Crispin said otherwise, but he might be wrong.”
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I didn’t get the impression, when I saw her yesterday, that it was something she had done to herself. She didn’t mention having taken anything on purpose. But I suppose it’s possible. It’s not something she necessarily would have mentioned to me. We weren’t friends, and she might have been concerned about the way I would react.”
“She might have done it and not realized how bad it would be,” Christopher said.
Perhaps. Although it still seemed to me that it was something a woman would do at home, not in someone else’s house during an engagement party.
Christopher nodded. “Unless, as discussed earlier, she was doing it to make a point.”
“What point would that be, though? St George said he hadn’t had relations with her since February. It couldn’t have been his child.”
Wolfgang was looking from Christopher to me and back, watching as we batted ideas back and forth between us like two people who are used to discussing things rapid-fire.
“Perhaps I wasn’t talking about St George,” Christopher said.
Oh, really? “Who, then? Geoffrey?”
“He does have a way of getting around,” Christopher said apologetically.
Yes, of course he did. “He spent yesterday evening tangled up with Lady Violet Cummings. Do you think Cecily would have stood for that if she were carrying Geoffrey’s child?”
Christopher made a face. “Depends on how she felt about him, I suppose. Personally, I would have been happy to have someone take Geoffrey off my hands.”
So would I, now that he mentioned it.
“How do you know that Geoffrey was exercising his wiles on Lady Violet last night?” Christopher added.
“Nellie told me,” I said. “The maid. She said Geoffrey was in the garden with Lady Violet, and Olivia Barnsley was somewhere with the Honorable Reggie. Cecily was in her bedchamber with Dominic Rivers.”
“Which is a bit suspicious, don’t you think?”
That Cecily had had a private meeting with a known dope dealer just before she ended up dead from a suspected overdose? Yes, I would have to say so. “It might have been innocent. Perhaps he’s the baby’s father. Or perhaps she wanted a vial of bismuth.”
“If she wanted bismuth,” Christopher said, “she could have gone to any corner chemist. Bismuth isn’t controlled.”
No. But pennyroyal isn’t, either. In fact, pennyroyal grows wild all over the place. Anyone with access to an AGA cooker can make a pot of pennyroyal tea, as long as they know where to find the leaves.
I tried to imagine Geoffrey, stalk in hand, wandering into the Marsden Manor kitchen to brew up a dose of lethal poison to feed to Cecily Fletcher, and drew a blank. Someone would have seen him, surely. The staff would have said something tosomeone, and the news would have been all over the manor by now if Geoffrey had been messing about in the kitchen.
Could he have asked someone to do it for him? Handed them a handful of leaves and asked them to turn it into tea?
That made more sense. Or did it? Someone would have mentioned that, too, wouldn’t they? Unless he had sworn someone to secrecy, of course, but if Cecily had been murdered, that someone wasn’t likely to keep it to themselves forever. People don’t tend to keep things to themselves when murder is concerned. Not unless they’re on the hook for it themselves.
Or perhaps Crispin was simply wrong, and Cecily had done this to herself. Having a child out of wedlock isn’t something a well-bred young lady should aspire to, not even in our modern day and age. Perhaps the gentleman had rejected her, or wasn’t someone she could see herself being married to.
If the gentleman in question was Lord Geoffrey Marsden, that would explain—or would at least go some way towards explaining—why this had happened here at Marsden Manor, and not in the privacy of Cecily’s own flat. And it certainly made sense that she wouldn’t want to marry him, since he would undoubtedly keep on bedding anything that moved even after he was married. Especially if the marriage was forced on him by an unexpected pregnancy.
No, that all made an unfortunate amount of sense. But then the pennyroyal had turned out to be too strong, and Cecily had died instead of simply ridding herself of the unwanted pregnancy.
It was a terrible outcome, of course, but it explained everything. And all I had to do to square it in my head, was disregard Crispin’s assertion that Cecily wouldn’t.
But then again, what did Crispin know? Until last night, by his own admission, he hadn’t had anything to do with her in months.
“I think you ought to leave the detecting to the constabulary, Philippa,” Wolfgang said, and I blinked and looked up at him. He smiled, and added, persuasively, “What’s more likely, after all? That it was an accident, or that it was murder? That someone shot at you deliberately, or that someone had a misfire?”
