29
Beatrice was not at home when i called. She had gone to visit Jane Stilleman in prison. I spoke to Mrs. Fenwick, who emphatically denied that she'd ever so much as heard Lizzie's name. The girl had never worked in the house. This was not unexpected, of course. The real issue was whether Beatrice had written the false character, but that was not a question for the housekeeper. As I was preparing to leave, I noticed Thomkins in the garden and decided to speak with him.
"I understand Mrs. Francis is visiting Jane today. Have you gone to see her, too?"
"No, madam." He continued trimming the rosebushes.
"I'm afraid that it's becoming more and more likely that she'll be found guilty of murder."
No reply.
"Mr. Thomkins, this is most serious. Jane, the woman you supposedly love, could very well be hanged. Have you nothing to say?"
"What could there be to say? I don't know who did it."
"Have you tried to offer her any comfort?"
"What could I do? Tell her I'm sorry for her?"
"I'm sure she'd appreciate it. You could at least send a letter."
"I'm not much good with writing."
"Can you think of anyone else in the household who would have wanted to see Mr. Francis dead? Has anything out of the ordinary happened in the past few months? Any unusual visitors, any — "
"Do you think I haven't gone over this a thousand times in my head? The police have questioned me from morning to night over and over. It all looked bad for me, too, you know, the nicotine having come from my shed."
"Your shed?"
"I use it for the roses. Kills aphids."
Why had Beatrice not told me this? "So how did you manage to avoid arrest?"
"I was at my sister's the week before the murder. Jane brought the lotion to Mr. Francis while I was gone."
"But you could have put the nicotine in it any time before then."
"I suppose so, but I didn't." He paused. "Look, why would I want Mr. Francis dead? Or Stilleman for that matter? You pointed out yourself that I could have married Jane, and I didn't."
"Here's what I don't understand: If Jane wanted to kill her husband, why would she have killed Mr. Francis first?" I asked. "Are we to believe that she only intended to kill Mr. Francis? He was, after all, the one threatening her position. She had no way of knowing that Mrs. Francis would let Stilleman take the shaving lotion and any other toiletries he wanted."
"I don't know," he said.
"But if Jane knew the lotion was poisoned, wouldn't she have stopped him from using it?"
He stopped trimming the roses and turned to face me. "Not if she wanted him dead."
"If she wanted to be free of her marriage, she could have achieved that by simply killing Stilleman. It would have looked much less suspicious had there been only one death."
"Maybe she never thought of that. Maybe Mr. Francis had already told her he was letting her go and she panicked."
"You sound as if you think she's guilty," I said.
"Maybe I do."
"You think her capable of murdering two men?"
"All I know is that she helped me with the roses more than once. She knew all about the nicotine. Now, I didn't tell the police that, but can you see that I'm not sure what to think?"
I could indeed. Regardless, it seemed to me unlikely that these crimes were simply the result of a servant being caught in an illicit affair. Not when there were so many other things swirling around. Was I to believe that the connection between Mr. Francis and Charles Berry was, in the end, meaningless? Surely the fear of losing the throne to which he aspired was as strong a motive for murder as any Jane Stilleman could have had. Both she and Berry stood to lose everything; in this, at least, the servant and the gentleman were equals. Yet I wanted the more complicated explanation to be the correct one.
I needed to think but found that doing so served only to confuse me. Better that I should detach myself, focus on something else, and let all this simmer in the back of my mind. Back in London, I sought out Mr. Wainwright in the British Library. It took very little effort to find him; he was at his desk in the Reading Room, in danger of being buried by the badly stacked piles of books that surrounded him.
"Lady Ashton!"
"Please do not get up," I said. "I'm afraid something will fall on you if you make a sudden movement." He did not heed my warning and, as he stood, knocked over at least a dozen books.
"I'm terribly sorry," he said, bending over to retrieve them from the floor. I would have liked to help him, but a corset, even one laced loosely, makes bending over nearly impossible.
"There's no need to apologize to me. It's the books that deserve your concern." He finished stacking them, though in no less precarious a way than they'd been before. "I've been pondering for some weeks now the dauphin's escape from France during the revolution and have come to the conclusion that he must have gone to England."
"A popular theory," Mr. Wainwright said. "Certainly supported by legend. There are numerous stories of English families who helped Frenchmen flee the terror."
"Do any of them claim to have assisted the dauphin?"
"None that can prove it, but I've always thought that anyone who had aided the boy would have kept quiet. He would have been in a great deal of danger, even in England, had the revolutionaries known what became of him."
"But what about later? The monarchy was restored after Napoleon's defeat."
"Quite right. But Louis XVIII would never have been king if the dauphin had been around to inherit the throne. Would it have been safe for Louis Charles to reveal himself? If the dauphin survived, he did so anonymously. He had no band of supporters, no army, no court."
"I wonder if, after having witnessed at such a young age the brutality of the revolution, he would even want to be king," I said.
Mr. Wainwright shrugged. "I don't know. Royalty think differently than we do."
"But if he were brought up as an ordinary boy, surely he would think more like us? Do you know the names of any of the English families that aided the aristocrats?"
"William Wickham helped thousands of people escape, but he was based in Switzerland on orders of the Foreign Office. All secret, of course. The Viscount Torrington in Sevenoaks housed refugees, and a number of exiled clergy stayed at the King's House in Winchester."
"Sevenoaks? In Kent?"
"Yes."
"Thank you, Mr. Wainwright. You've been most helpful." I rushed home, not to my library, but to the sitting room that Philip's mother had used when she was mistress of the house. I pulled open every drawer in the room and searched the contents but did not find that which I needed. Davis entered the room as I was in the midst of this tempest, and stood, looking more amused than he ought, waiting for me to speak.
"What is it, Davis?"
"May I help you, madam?"
"Burke's Peerage, Davis. I need Burke's Peerage."
"I don't believe that the viscount owned it."
"I figured as much. But surely his mother —"
"She took all her things to the dowager house in Derbyshire, madam. But if I may? Our own Mrs. Ockley has a copy."
"Really?"
"She was quite devoted to the viscount, and when his engagement was announced, she took it upon herself to evaluate your ancestry."
"Would she be willing to lend the book to me?" I asked, and sat, astonished, as I waited for him to inquire. He returned shortly, bearing a well-worn volume.
"It's an older edition, madam. Mrs. Ockley bought it used."
I searched through the book until I found the Torringtons and traced my finger along the page, stopping when I came to the children of the fourth viscount: Sarah Elizabeth, Catherine Jane, and Elinor Constance. The estate was in Kent, near Sevenoaks, just where Lady Elinor told me she had spent her childhood.