Page 53 of Mischief at Marsden Manor
He shook his head. “Why would I kill her? As Astley said—Lord St George, I mean—she was a nice girl. I would have married her if the baby was mine and if she had wanted me to.”
Well, of course he would have now that I thought about it. Cecily was, or had been, a Fletcher. The daughter of a younger son, and a mere Honorable, but a Fletcher. She would have been several steps up the societal ladder for someone like Dominic Rivers, who, as far as I knew, was a product of Southwark or some other equally depressed—or depressing—section of London.
“Perhaps she didn’t want to marry you,” I said, turning it over in my head and trying to get the pieces to fit in other ways. “Perhaps she didn’t think you were suitable husband-material, and she turned you down.”
I would have expected him to get angry over the slight to his eligibility, but all he did was shake his head again. “If that were the case, I would have let her do whatever she wanted. I have no desire to get married, you know, even if I would have done theright thing had it been required of me. But I certainly wouldn’t have taken the choice out of her hands by killing her.”
That was a reasonable point, actually. “Fine,” I said. “I never really thought you’d done it, anyway.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t. She was a client. I don’t get romantically involved with clients.”
He was smarter than Billy Chang in that, at least. Billy had bedded quite a few of the women who fetched and carried dope for him, or so I had heard. It hadn’t helped him at all in his trial.
“At least you admit that she was a client,” I said. “Would you like to tell me what she bought from you?”
But he shook his head. “I believe not, Miss Darling. My apologies.”
He gave me a little bow. It might have been my own frustration that assigned mockery to it.
“All I’m trying to figure out,” I said, “is whether or not she took something herself, not pennyroyal but something else, because she wanted to deal with the predicament she had found herself in, and it accidentally killed her, or whether someone else gave it to her deliberately, either to bring on a miscarriage or to get rid of Cecily altogether. That’s all I want.”
He didn’t answer, and I added, “She’s dead, Mr. Rivers. She can’t be hurt by anything you tell me now. What’s happened is already scandalous enough. Surely you can just tell me this one thing…?”
“I’m afraid not, Miss Darling. She might be beyond care, but other people are not.”
“Yourself included,” I said sourly. When he didn’t answer—because what could he say, other than that I was right?—I sighed. “Can you at least tell me who invited you here?”
He smirked. “Of course, Miss Darling. It was your cousin.”
“My— Do you mean St George?”
“Who else?”
“I have quite a few cousins here this weekend,” I told him. “And St George isn’t one of them, as it happens, although it’s an easy mistake to make. Did he ask you to bring him anything?”
“Of course not. Requiring gifts would be terribly uncouth. I’m sure he’s above that.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” I said, “and you know it.”
I waited a moment, but when he didn’t seem willing to incriminate himself further—or at all—I added, “I suppose I’ll just have to tell Constable Collins what you said and have him deal with it.”
“I said that I didn’t kill her, or provide her with drugs to cause an abortion, and that I wasn’t the father of her child,” Rivers said.
I nodded. “And I’ll have to tell him that.”
“Be my guest, Miss Darling.” He sketched some sort of salute and glanced down the hallway in the direction of the back door. “They’re outside on the lawn, you said?”
I nodded.
“In that case, I think I’ll head up to my room. Enjoy the peace and quiet while Reggie’s down here.”
There was nothing I could do to stop him, nor did I feel the need, so I merely told him, “Enjoy your solitude,” and watched as he climbed the staircase up to the first floor and turned down the hallway towards the back staircase up to the next level. Once he was out of sight, I turned on my own heel and headed down the hallway towards the boot room and the door to the backyard.
The others were stillon the lawn when I got out there, standing in a group in the middle of the grass, in roughly the spot where Francis, Christopher, and I had stood this morning when the bullet had whizzed by. I glanced at the wall on my waypast, and saw that the bullet was now gone, and so was the chip of stone it had kicked loose.
The afternoon sun lit up Christopher’s butter yellow hair, and Crispin’s silver blond ditto, and brought out chestnut highlights in Constable Collins’s dark mop. They all three turned towards me when they heard the door shut.
“Darling,” Crispin said after a moment, neutrally, at the same time as Christopher uttered a more welcoming, “Pippa.”
