“Has he always been an inebriate?” I asked.
“No. He has not. He was a lovely gentleman, very quiet, devoted to his wife. Oh, he liked a drink from time to time, but when she died, he seemed unable to gather himself up again.” Miss Cavendish’s eyes were coldly unsympathetic. “He has a duty to the people of this valley, a duty he neglects in order to nurture his own grief. He would find a better remedy for his pain if he applied himself to his responsibilities,” she finished, thrusting her way past me towards the kitchens.
“Cold comfort there,” Plum observed, raising his brows after her.
“Yes, but she does have a point. Pain, grief, loneliness, they are quicksand. They will consume a man if he does not lift a finger to extricate himself.”
“If you struggle in quicksand, you die faster,” Plum corrected.
I waved an impatient hand. “You know what I mean. If a man in peril uses his wits and his natural ingenuity, he may save himself. But a man who gives up has already perished.”
The words cut too near the bone, I think, for Plum fell into a reverie, and we said nothing more of significance as the hours ticked away. From time to time we could hear voices from within Jane’s room, and once a terrible, prolonged sob. But at length Mary-Benevolence appeared, her face drawn but smiling.
“The child lives, and the mother as well,” she told us. I clutched at Plum’s arm in relief, and he squeezed my hand in return.
“Is it born?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. The pains have stopped and they both rest. She must not rise again until the child is born. Peaceful repose, that is what is required now.”
“Of course,” I told her. “We will do whatever we can to take care of her.”
Mary-Benevolence bowed her head. “I will bring her some refreshment to build her strength, and then she will sleep again. No visitors tonight, I think.”
“I understand,” I told her, suddenly happy that Jane’s care rested in the hands of this tiny, determined woman. “Thank you for all you have done for her.”
She looked at me in surprise. “But it is my duty. She is Mr. Freddie’s wife and she carries his child. She belongs to this house and to this valley now.”
With that, Mary-Benevolence padded away and Plum and I exchanged glances.
“I suppose we can do nothing more tonight,” he said. “I think I will take a tray in my room and go straight to bed. It has been exhausting doing nothing,” he added with a smile. I did not reprove him for his levity. Such relief after so much worry was disorienting, it left one light-headed and peculiar.
Plum hastened to his room while I wandered slowly after, stretching the muscles that had stiffened after hours of sitting in the hall. And as my body stirred to life, so did my mind, and I saw what I ought to have seen hours before: it was entirely possible that Freddie Cavendish had not been murdered at all.
The Fifth Chapter
Henceforth I deal in whispers.
—Untimely Leave
Rabindranath Tagore
I lay awake late into the night, pondering the implications of Freddie Cavendish’s death. If he had been treated by the doctor, perhaps it was simply mischance, a professional lapse of judgement that caused his death, and nothing more. We had seized upon Portia’s insistence that Freddie had been murdered, but what was there in the way of actual proof? A few vaguely unsettled letters from Jane that might well have been the product of a mind overwrought by grief and her condition. We had seen firsthand the kindliness of the Cavendishes. They had neither the warmth nor the affection of the Marches, to be sure, but they were dutiful and seemed to take every proper care of Jane as the possible mother of the heir to the Peacocks. True, Miss Cavendish seemed unwilling to relinquish the role of chatelaine, but I found it hard to fault her for it. She had ruled the household with a firm hand for decades, and it would be difficult to turn either her keys or her responsibilities over to a newcomer. Jane, for her part, had always left domestic arrangements to Portia and busied herself with her pottery and her music. I could not imagine her counting the linen and poking her nose into the store cupboards as Miss Cavendish doubtless did.
Could the whole of the trouble then be laid at the door of the twin pressures of Jane’s widowhood and impending motherhood? I had seen enough of my own sisters become hysterical while they carried to know that it was not the most docile and sensible of times. And coming hand in glove with widowhood—I could not imagine the strain upon Jane’s nerves. They would be strung taut as bowstrings, and it would take very little more to make them snap.
No, there was no evidence as yet that Freddie had been murdered, and for all my excited sleuthing and recording of suspicious behaviour in my notebook, I had quite forgot the most important part of any investigation was to begin at the beginning. Clearly, the beginning here was determining the cause of Freddie Cavendish’s death. I buried my face in my pillow, deeply chagrined that I had started so wide of the mark, and doubly glad that Brisbane had not been about to see it. I should start fresh in the morning, I promised myself. I would ask the right questions of the right people, and I would learn all that I could about the mysterious doctor who had lost his wife to a man-eating tiger.
At last I slid into sleep, but even as I slept I heard the high, keening cry of the peacock, calling over and again in the night.
The next morning I arose full of determination and plans, all of which were thwarted almost immediately.
I had thought to call upon the doctor with a pretense of some minor ailment, but Portia flatly refused to leave the estate.
“Jane cannot leave the house, and I cannot leave Jane,” she informed me. The dark crescents purpling the skin under her eyes told me she had not left her the whole of the previous night.
“I slept in a chair,” she confirmed as she helped herself to breakfast. She took only a piece of toast and some tea. A lone stewed peach sat forlornly upon her plate. “Today I will have a small bed moved into her room, so I will be there in the night should she have need of me.”
“You will wear yourself to nothing if you do not get proper food and rest,” I said mildly. “And then who will nurse Jane?”
Her face took on the mulish expression I knew too well. “I am stronger than you give me credit for, Julia. I trust you will find something to amuse yourself.”
I toyed with my own peach. It had been well cooked, with a dusting of nutmeg in the syrup, but I had little appetite. “I had thought to call upon the doctor. It would be much more appropriate if you came with me.”
“Out of the question,” she said, but to mollify me she took a bit of porridge. “I have far too much to do. I have a trunkful of books I have not yet read. I can read them to Jane. Also, she would like to see the garden, so I must have her bed moved a little to give her a view from the window. And her linen ought to be changed freshly each morning. I will have to instruct the maids.”
Portia was a force to be reckoned with when given her head, so I sat back and merely sipped at my tea as she narrowed her gaze in my direction.
“What do you mean to do today, dearest?” she asked.
I thought a moment. “We still do not know if Freddie was murdered,” I said, casting a quick glance over my shoulder to make quite certain we were not overheard. “If this doctor is so incompetent, it might merely have been a bungled job on his part. I was so busy pondering motive I never bothered to find out precisely how Freddie died. That must be the first order of business.”
Portia nodded, but her gaze was faraway, and I knew the question of Freddie’s murder was nothing to her so long as Jane was in need. I sighed. I was alone in my investigation, I realised, with no faithful companion to help me gather evidence or sort impressions.
Except